Stage3D is starting to look incredibly promising for developers. Whether you are targeting mobile, web, or desktop or developing for gaming or data visualization, the future is bright. I was in the Adobe offices in San Francisco last week meeting with the team, and Thibault Imbert showed us some jaw dropping demos… Keep an eye out for whenever those become public.
…but it is not all about games. In a recent post, I showed off some basic stage3d hardware accelerated graphics within AIR on mobile devices. I’ve been developing some ideas to show how this can be applied within non-gaming contexts, and I figured I’d show my progress so far. The previous post was an actionscipt-only project. In enterprise scenarios, you most likely will want to take advantage of the plethora of pre-built components that the Flex framework provides. The progression for me was natural; How about showing what Stage3D can do within a Flex for mobile application?
Above is a fairly basic visualization application. There is a stage3D-based custom charting component, tied into data that is displayed using a standard spark List with a custom item renderer. The chart is based on my previous example, and obviously isn’t fully fleshed out (no legend, no ticks, no axis labels, etc…). Did I mention, this is on a tablet? Oh yeah, that is pretty awesome. Did I also mention that it will be cross platform once released? Oh yeah, that is pretty awesome too.
The data is morbid, but it works for my scenario. It is based on this data set from CMU.edu, which shows the cancer deaths and the number of cigarrettes consumed per state.
Please keep in mind, this is all beta, and not a final build. I’ll post the source code once Stage3D for mobile is publicly available.