Sites

At 3DPregnancy, one of the ParentsConnect family of websites maintained by Nickelodeon, you can view 3D illustrations of gestating babies in utero. There are 42 images, one for each week of pregnancy, showing embryonic and fetal development. (The picture above is the 39th week.)

(A hat-tip and congratulations to Kellie Lambert, in her eighth week.)

I don't want to overuse words like "awesome," lest they lose their force. Things that are merely admirable should not be called awesome; only those things that inspire wonder and dread for their great beauty and genius merit this description. So, you should understand how serious a remark it is, when I say this site is awesome.

Mark Barcinski and Adrien Jeanjean are multimedia designers in Amsterdam. Their newly launched portfolio website, www.barcinski-jeanjean.com, uses anaglyphic 3-D navigation to display the samples of their impressive work.

The designers themselves are standing in a panoramic view of Amsterdam (which you can rotate 360 degrees by moving your cursor over the arrows to the left and right). Their portfolio samples are represented as paper sheets hovering in a ring around them, as though they were emanating from the artists' minds.

Upon entering, you have the option of playing a little 3-D ping-pong game while the site loads. Even the little game is cool! If it were a stand-alone game rather than a pre-loader, I would still be writing about it: simple and fun, excellent use of 3-D physics.

The blog entry about the site explains how they built it in Adobe Flash with Actionscript 3 and the Papervision3D engine. It will be relatively easy to modify their portfolio in the future, since the data and images are loaded with external XML, so we may look forward to updates.

Stereo pictures are not just for fun and entertainment, they are also for documenting history. At least since 1865, the horror and destruction of war have been recorded in 3-D photographs. Now, we may see the devastation of the September 11 attack in 3-D aerial photos.

On Sept. 16, 2001, CNN posted video of a helicopter view of New York City, still smoldering from the deadly attack on the World Trade Center five days earlier. Photographer David Friedman made sixteen 3-D anaglyph images from CNN's video footage. The images are very small; their size was limited by the dimensions of CNN's streaming video. But even at this size, they are haunting images of evil, and the 3-D makes them all the more real.

As the anniversary of the 9/11 attack once again approaches, please remember the victims, and pray for our country.

Hooray, a new 3-D comic!

Artist Dekker Dreyer has just launched an online sequential art project titled Damaged Goods: A 3D Sketchbook. I would guess it's science fiction, but I reckon anything can happen at this stage. Above are the first two pages, so you can start following the story from the very beginning! (This site is so new, the "About" page still says "This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this [etc.]") Dreyer says he plans to add two new pages per week.

The online comic is free, but if you have some money, you could pick up the Damaged Goods 3D skateboard, starting at $60.