Interactive 3D with Shockwave
By Greg Meyers
Macromedia Director sprang from the CD-ROM industry of the early 1990s, quickly earning its reputation as the premier authoring package for interactive multimedia content. In 1995, the introduction of Shockwave technology added a whole new twist. With Shockwave, Director programmers could embed code initially intended for CD-ROMs directly into Web pages for delivery over the Internet. Before long, a cottage industry of Shockwave developers was producing original, fully interactive content for this new medium.
These days, Macromedia's other multimedia product for the Web, Flash, has stolen much of Shockwave for Director's thunder. With its more compact content, simple user interface, and a plug-in that comes as a standard install with most browsers, Web developers without a CD-ROM background have found Flash much more accessible than its more sophisticated, older cousin.
Shockwave for Director still offers exciting capabilities that Flash can't match, however—especially in the most recent version, 8.5—thanks to Macromedia's recent technology partnership with Intel. Although it's just a humble, half-point version increase from Macromedia's previous release, Director 8.5 now incorporates hardware-accelerated, real-time, interactive 3D graphics—not 2D images shaded to look like 3D, but mathematical 3D objects rendered on the fly.
Applications for 3D
Many people have the same reaction the first time they see real-time, interactive 3D playing in a browser window. First their eyes get big.
