I wanted to call this post “Project Cemetery”. Some experiments go bad, some go good. This one went far better than I expected, but besides interesting results, nothing really kicked off. Let me start from the beginning then. Last year (2010) I met a group of awesome people – employees of the OTHER media, who showed off some cool stuff in Mobile. One thing was particularly cool. A 3d app prototype in WebKit showed off by Chris Harris (@_ChrisHarris). Couple months later, I was lucky enough to join the team and work on a web app written with JS and CSS transforms. After that I got really excited about how much rendering power you can squeeze out from a browser on an iPhone, I decided to play a bit more with 3d transforms, see where it takes me.

Experiment #1: 3D Sci-Fi Racing game

(try it on Safari/WebKit nightly)
controls: arrow keys, space, C

I got carried away on this one! It was pretty cool, but runs correctly only on Safari/WebKit nightly. It has a physics engine, collision detection. All graphics using pure CSS3. Some of you may wonder: why not WebGL? Well.. there is one major problem with WebGL – it’s not supported on any mobile devices at the moment! And it might not be for a while, but while experiment no 1 was pretty cool, it failed to run on the iPhone. I’ve tried optimising, but I had to change the concept and do it from scratch. I was scratching my head, if it’s even worth trying, since there isn’t much of a case for such usage of this technology. It couldn’t compete with native 3d games. I finally got convinced by Chris: “iAds. You can use this in iAds.”. It made perfect sense, I then realised that when I saw the iAd keynote, I hated these ads, especially the games. Toy Story 3 puzzle game? :/ Ugh!! Here’s my shot at a game embeddable in iAds:

Experiment #2: 3D Platform game optimised for iOS

(try it on any WebKit browser including iOS)
controls on PC: arrow keys, space.

Boom! By the end of November 2010 it was finished. No-one could believe that this was a Web-app. And it ran on an iPhone 3G! You basically play a penguin who picks up ice cream 😀 I’ve been looking into selling this piece as a framework, but it didn’t work out. Turns out trying to work with ad agencies is quite hard too. If anyone’s still interested, give us a shout. I enjoyed the “journey” and got some cool demos out of it 😉 Gotta keep on trying!