As an engineer for Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, I'm lucky to get to use the latest tools available to develop engaging and interactive ActionScript applications. So, I'm surprised that a lot of people still think Flash is best used for screensavers and banner ads. For last month's Yahoo! Hack Day, I decided to show off some of the impressive capabilities of the latest Adobe Flash Player and ActionScript 3 by building a visually interesting new way to browse Yahoo! News top stories. In a surprisingly short amount of time, I was able to mash up two existing Yahoo! services, and then represent the information in a virtual environment I call the NewsGlobe.
The NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Y! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information off to the Yahoo! Maps service to find a matching location, and return latitude and longitude coordinates for it. The rest is simply a matter of using the 3D classes in ActionScript to create a visually engaging experience that's either automated or interactive.
Papervision3D makes it incredibly easy to create a 3D scene, add 3D objects to it, and specify where the camera (i.e., the user's viewpoint) should be located. For each story location where we are able to discern a lat-long coordinate, we draw a marker object and place it in the proper position on a sphere representing the Earth. The display is calculated and drawn in real time. This allows us to animate the view over time and even lets the user change the view by interacting with the objects in the scene.
Since the final product itself is a SWF (Shockwave Flash) file, NewsGlobe can live online as a web application or be embedded off-network as a scaled-down customizable badge. It could also be integrated into a Yahoo! Widget or packaged as an Adobe AIR application to run locally on the desktop. By passing in different RSS feeds or search terms, it could be possible to watch stories occurring in a specific part of the world, from a particular category, or matching other keywords.
In all, NewsGlobe was a fun project to test a simple idea and see if I could achieve the desired result within a short amount of time with relatively little difficulty. Is it perfect? No. Could we add a lot of additional features to make it something more useful and accurate? Absolutely. However, I would certainly consider this a successful proof of concept and viable prototype for similar future interactive 3D visualizations.
If you want to learn more about the individual pieces used to create the NewsGlobe, follow the links below:
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Comment by 3DGeoStats — February 13th, 2008 at 3:31 am
This looks great. It reminds me a bit of another project which deals with webstats and earth visualization. We have published a online demo. Just check http://www.3dgeostats.com/demo.php
Regards from Berlin
Comment by Farhan Lalji — February 13th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Very cool. Showed it to the wife, she’s going to use it to show her kids (she’s a teacher) about how news develops in the world.
Comment by Scott — February 14th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Would it be possible to pipe the output from a Yahoo Pipe into this?
Comment by Lucas J. Shuman — February 14th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Funny you should ask that, Scott, as the first round of this did in fact use a geo-news pipe as it data source. Currently the data loader/parser is tailored to fit the specific services I am using, but given more development time it could be built more generically to accept different data sources and draw the results accordingly. So the short answer - possible, yes - now, no.
Comment by Brian Humphrey — February 17th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Great application! We would love to do a hyperlocal version by scraping the lon/lat from each of our incident related blog posts:
http://lafd.blogspot.com (from html code in address links)
…as well as our many geocoded Flickr images:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lafd
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,
Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Service Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department
Comment by vgarun — February 18th, 2008 at 3:00 am
ita awesome..but only meager amount of news is published
Comment by Olivier D. alias ze kat — February 18th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Hum hum… Why not create screensaver with your Flash application ?
Excuse me, but I could say that official Yahoo! screensavers are s*** !
NB: I create several un-official Yahoo! screensavers (for pleasure). I will please help you if you request it. I’m author of 100% source-code to embed Flash movie ;o)))))
http://ymplus.miaouw.net/english/extras/yamster-last-dance/
Comment by marco borgna — February 19th, 2008 at 7:12 am
nice work! I will experiment with papervision too.
Comment by Ramesh — February 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Great work. I jus’ love it.
Comment by Sarah — February 24th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
It looks amazing, though i can’t find any news that is going on in England, am i missing something?
i think it’s such a amazing tool, to have it as a background and have it on a setting, like music news in a certain country that would be amazing…
keep up the good work guys,
take care
Sarah
x
Comment by P Kayne — February 24th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
It doesn’t seem to be working on the Mac. I have been trying it in the various browsers and all I get is a black screen.
Comment by Hepp Maccoy — February 26th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
I like the autoplay mode. Great work Lucas, it came out awesome.
Comment by Ian — February 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am
I am on Mac OSX 10.5.2 using Safari 3.0.4 and everything is working just fine, apart from the fact that it’s as though very little happens outside of America. Any chance of other RSS feeds such as a BBC News feed?
Comment by Chris — March 14th, 2008 at 7:56 am
This application looks and functions a whole lot like Nintendo’s News Channel. If you haven’t seen it yet, it comes packaged with the Wii.
Comment by anselm — March 17th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
It’s extremely nice, very impressed. Still, how about making that little fella open source - ideally BSD licensed? We’re slowly pushing one out ourselves at http://meadanglobe.googlecode.com … but would switch in a heartbeat if a better solution presented itself. I feel the gold standard has to not just be qualities like runs in a browser, handles tiling, arcball, motion momentum, plots rss and the like ( such as the ones from poly9 and etsy and as well http://del.icio.us/tag/spinny+globe ) but as well triple open: open source, open data, open development. The value to me at least is to ultimately have something that is persistent, durable, trustworthy and reproducible. Regarding BSD licensing - from my point of view source code can be a liability; I don’t want to have the burden of ownership and maintenance so the most free license is what I would recommend.
Comment by BT — April 30th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Making this opensource is a great idea, people can make lots of other mashups. Please consider.
Comment by gustavo Estrella — May 1st, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Any feedback on wether making this opensource or on the least sharing the code ? Just starting in a very similar type application.