Just launched a minimalist 3D Flash showcase site for a lifestyle store in London – Bermondsey 167.

The idea was to use “tags” behind the scenes so that various “rooms” could be generated easily and quickly without any limitations. Tags can be visible frontside or hidden – for example, everything tagged *init appears on the homepage but that tag is never actually visible to users. This allows a more organic browsing experience that you would have if you went into the shop – one second you are looking at the beautiful shirts of Michael McGrath’s label M2CG, but you turn round and you’re looking at his equally stunning mirror tables and units. Similarly a bright top on the site tagged with “colour” can be clicked to generate a ‘room’ with just colourful items from bookends to photos to a cotton slipover.

Its a quirky shop, with quirky owners and a quirky little dog running around… but that is all part of the character, and it was a lot of fun.

Technical Notes

The site was built using Papervision3D, PureMVC and CodeIgniter for the backend system. SWFAddress was employed for deep linking as we are now doing by default on every Flash project. Some old school 3D Studio Max skills were wheeled in courtesy of Lee (Ellis) to give an element of sheen not possible with PV3D yet.

This was Steve’s first ActionScript build using PureMVC and he had this to say about it:

“For apps and Flash sites on this scale, PureMVC is great – communications between modules becomes a lot easier, and despite the huge amount of casting involved (wrecking the poor old typing fingers) it was definitely worth using the framework for the B167 project. It seems to me that every framework has positives and negatives, but sometimes its just nice to know that there is an underlying architecture that makes scaling up easier should the need arise. Halfway through this build, the client wanted some deep changes to parts of the site, but there was no backtracking whatsoever… we just built a whole new section, plumbed it in and that was that.”

Weighing in at 84k its a pretty good example of writing a nice little Flash engine that can flex its muscles and just handles loads of data and information.