Professional Papervision3D

Chapter 12. Developing 3D Websites

The coolest thing you can do in Flash is build 3D websites. But 3D is more than about being cool. It hooks into a cognitive process that accelerates learning, and makes possible the exploration of items typically limited to 2D. If you're selling a car on the web with 3D, you can spin around it, and even get inside it and take it for a virtual test drive. And if your site has the virtual test drive and your competitor doesn't, it's not hard to guess who'll most likely make the sale. Or if you're teaching radiation safety, and you want to avoid watching toxic waste burn off your gloves in the real world, you can do it in the virtual world.

In this chapter, you examine a few helpful tips for creating 3D websites, convert an existing 2D website to 3D, and learn how to optimize your site for web search engines.

What You Need to Know

In this section, you examine the why of 3D and a few reality checks that apply to working with 3D in Flash. Every true "flashmatician" gets excited about the potential of creating ubiquitous 3D content for the web. But once the enthusiasm dies down, there are a number of issues that you need to examine in order to save time and frustration when developing in 3D.

Why Use 3D

Why use 3D? Because it's all about learning!

Many educators regard using 3D in the academic arena as overkill. They'd rather plug their students into lifeless 2D learning management systems, whose learning content rests solely on endless threaded discussion ...