I was recently contracted to develop a new PaperVision3D project for Display Objects Inc. It’s a cool new page flip engine, much like the multitude  of flip engines already out there, but this time in 3D. The first thing I learned is that while many of these engines say they are 3D almost none actually are. So that didn’t help much when I was looking for ideas on how to go about doing this. Thankfully I had developed a couple similar models when building some new portfolio tools, so I was able to leverage much of that. The only visual question was how to get that nice bending effect on the planes when flipping. That’s where AS3DMod came in, which is a handy helper for doing things like twisting and bending 3d objects. It is open source and really  must have for your papervsion library.

I added a lot of nice features into this product, including making all copy searchable, and highlighting the results. I added a nice zoom slider bar, to let users set their own zoom level when reading. The whole thing is Search Engine Optimized so the contents of the “book” are searchable on Google. Still working away on features, but have a look at PageFlip3D™; if you want to learn more.