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mrpinc
Participant
April 1, 2013

Adobe AIR- Stage3D Integration - Away3D?

Wondering what would be involved to support the rift in Adobe AIR. AIR allows for "Native Extensions" essentially native C/C++ code that can be packaged and used inside an AIR application. I don't have any real experience developing my own though.

There are a lot of 3D engines for AIR already in the market (Flare 3D, Minko, etc..) but Away3D is endorsed by Adobe and is open source so it seems like a good fit. There's already a discussion on the forums about Rift here: http://away3d.com/forum/viewthread/3286/

Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this / experience with AIR native extensions that could help implement

    30 replies

    SSJKamui
    Up and Coming
    April 1, 2013
    I used Papervision3D, but especially on that program, I thought that it was unnecessary complicated. Ofcourse, Flash/Air Support would be great, but Unity3D is definitely much easier and efficient than Flash.

    I also know this product line of Adobe is also slower than necessary.
    mrpincAuthor
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    Certainly Unity is great but to clarify some things currently, Papervision is a very old framework and was all about generating 3d scenes on the CPU which was extremely limited. AIR / Flash now supports OpenGL and DirectX rendering on the GPU, I have already created a variety of 3d apps with millions of polys in a scene.

    Ultimately, the more platforms that the Rift is on the better. Also I am not looking for official support but if anyone who has experience with AIR and developing ANEs and can help support a community driven extension that would be awesome.
    SSJKamui
    Up and Coming
    April 1, 2013
    "mrpinc" wrote:

    Ultimately, the more platforms that the Rift is on the better. Also I am not looking for official support but if anyone who has experience with AIR and developing ANEs and can help support a community driven extension that would be awesome.


    I agree. Lacking compatibility was a reason for the problems VR faced in the 90s.
    mrpincAuthor
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    For anyone interested there is a thread in the Away 3D forum about this topic:

    http://away3d.com/forum/viewthread/3286/
    jonathanhart
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    I am very interested in this, I have experience developing native extensions for mobile applications and am currently working on desktop specific ones for Mac OSX.

    I suspect that we could even get support for the Oculus up and going on MAC OSX via AIR relatively quickly, as much of the GPU integration is handled via Stage3D. I imagine the overall system working like this:

    - Away3D set up for stereoscopic multi-viewport
    - A fragment shader for peripheral warping of the viewports
    - AIR Native extension for integrating the tracking system w/ Away3D cameras
    mrpincAuthor
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    Jonathan,

    If you are interested in leading this maybe set up a GitHub page for the project (if open source is interesting to you). I'll be happy to contribute in any way I can, I have access to OSX and Windows.
    jonathanhart
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    Set up!

    https://github.com/jonathanhart/oculus-ane

    I will play with the Oculus SDK source code tonight and see how herculean of a task it will be to integrate with the tracking code. I don't have a headset yet (and likely wont for several weeks) but I'll do my best.
    mrpincAuthor
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    Awesome, I am already watching ('pchertok')

    I will let you know once I receive my kit, probably a while as I was someone who ordered via the website, although I was one of the first when they started selling via their site.

    I like how you are planning to support other engines. I don't have experience with Flare3D but I have a little with Alternativa and would have no problem learning Minko or whatever other 3D framework you wanted to support.
    jonathanhart
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    I suspect they'll be relatively simple, because they all use Stage3D and AGAL for shading. Much of the code can be reused amongst them.

    I was part of the kickstarter program but got in pretty late (my order # is in the 8000's). We'll see! I can at least get started with the SDK integration.
    jonathanhart
    Participant
    April 1, 2013
    I would imagine AIR will be a pretty popular way to play around with Oculus, considering you can develop for it for free. $1500 for Unity is a pretty hefty price tag, even with 4 months of it free.
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