Product presentations on the Internet

The market of interactive product presentations on the web is still in its infancy, but it’s increasing
fast. More and more product companies find a good product presentation on the web not to be a
marketing gadget anymore, but as valuable sales and support aid.
Today there are more alternatives to Flash, Director and LiveMotion when it comes to
producing interactive 2D presentations, and Viewpoint and Cult3D for photo-realistic 3D
presentations. Earlier this year Macromedia announced Director 8.5, which now also supports 3D
thought its Shockwave plug-in. Common for most of these 2D and 3D technologies today is that
the viewer have to download and install (or upgrade) a browser plug-in in order to view the
presentations.
The Swedish software company Demicron however, uses Java technology in its authoring tool
WireFusion to present both 2D and 3D and can therefore avoid the plug-in problem. WireFusion’s
complete 3D engine is squeezed in to impressive 31 kb (!), compared to a typical plug-in size of
0.3-1.5 Mb.

WireFusion introduction
WireFusion is a visual drag-and-drop programming tool for creating interactive product
presentations and simulations in both 2D and 3D for the web. A cool feature, available in
WireFusion 2.1, is that you can reuse your interactive or animated 2D presentations, or parts of
them, and replace the textures on your 3D models, and still preserve the built in interactivity. This
has maybe been possible to achieve before, but not with the ease as in WireFusion. This new
feature opens doors to new types of product presentations in 3D, where textures become
animated and intelligent!
In WireFusion you create your presentations by wiring objects together, you sort of build a
logical scheme. In the 2D presentations you work with images, texts and real-time filters in
layers, much like in Photoshop. You then trigger actions with mouse or keyboard events.
Mathematical and logical expressions can also be done.
When it comes to 3D, WireFusion reads VRML2.0 (also known as VRML97), which can be
exported from most 3D packages today. In some packages, like 3ds max, there are VRML
Helpers, which help to add some special VRML features.
Typically you create your 3D objects, with textures and animations (vertex animations work
too), in your 3D package. Common for most web-based 3D today is that low-polygon objects are
required, and as there is no built-in polygon optimizer in WireFusion you have to have this in
mind when creating your objects. When ready, everything is exported to VRML. The VRML file
is then inserted in to WireFusion where you finally add your logic, interactive textures, trigger
events and animations etc. When this is done, you simply press a Publish button and everything
comes out as a Java applet, inserted in to an HTML file and ready to be uploaded to your server.

Writer: Demicron