Aniden has always fostered an environment of learning and innovation. This year’s 3D bakeoff challenge was no exception. This intra-office competition tasked Aniden employees with forming multidisciplinary teams to create a piece featuring stereoscopic 3D imagery.

The Experience Team came up with a few goals to accompany the parameters of the competition. Beyond exploring stereoscopic 3D, we established individual goals for each team member. Tifa, our 3D artist wanted improve her character design skills by rigging, lighting, texturing and animating an organic creature. Ayan wanted to explore the limitations and advantages of using HTML5+jQuery+CSS3 as an emerging alterative to Flash for mobile deployment. As a UI designer, I wanted to work on an environmental touch UI coupled with simple game mechanics.

With all these goals in mind, we set a meeting to figure out how we could bring all these goals into a singular project. After a few rounds of ideas, we arrived at a decision to create a 3D plant that would react to user interaction. The team decided this plant would be a venus flytrap that would die if the user failed to feed it flies. This simple mechanic, along with a catchy name, Vicki the Venus Flytrap, creates an emotional connection to the plant. With a clear direction in mind, each of the team members started the initial research and sketching phase of the project.

Tifa’s sketching process yielded a “Little Shop of Horrors” type of character, with ferocious teeth and a crazy purple skin. My sketches focused on the UI and how we could blend our UI into a realistic environment. In the end, we decided to place Vicki in the corner of a broken down barn because it played off of her tongue-in-cheek horror motif. By the time we had settled on a style, Ayan had coded a working shell for the animation and UI.

For me, production involved creating two sets of images. One set was a fairly routine visual design of Vicki, in the environment with simple UI controls. The second set had to be separated into red and blue channels to create the stereoscopic 3D effect. We were able to achieve this effect by duplicating the images in the interface, separating them and adding layer styles to each set. Tifa was able to achieve the 3D effect on her character model by rendering out a stereoscopic image sequence from Maya.

Once the source images were complete, Ayan was able to drop them into the shell he had already programmed. With a few adjustments and some research into iOS development, the team was able to take the web based app and run it locally on an iPad using the Safari web browser API. In the end, I feel Vicki is a testament to what we can achieve visually and technologically, even in a short time frame. We look forward to using what we learned in the design and production process to push our abilities even further in the future.