Can PicLens be done in just Flash and Papervision3d ? Here ya go !

PicLens has been one of the new interfaces that has wowed quite a bit of people I know (including myself). But the application is written in native code and needs to be installed on your computer as a plugin to be usable. Off late I have been playing with Papervision3D a bit and I figured it was possible to kind of get the functionality just by using that. Here is the result of my experiments so far. (warning: this demo requires a good internet connection since I am loading a lot of images)

Update: Uploaded a video for users on poorer connections:

Click on the input text field, enter a search term and hit enter:

The code is built on top of the Paged – data classes I had talked about in my last post. So basically new photos are loaded from Flickr as you reach the edge of the currently loaded data set. The code is pretty awful right now since I had to revisit my basic algorithm a couple of times so if you scroll around quite a bit, it may begin to spike your memory or act all weird. I need to implement some recycling of renderers strategy which seems to be advised strongly for such applications. Also I am not completely happy with the tilting algorithm I have right now (to get it really right I need to change the algorithm to do a little more math, right now the transition from tilt to normal is a little jarring). Ah well, that happens later. Right now, I am just stoked this works :).

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur