This week has been a chance to find out more about Papervision, Away3D and APE physics engine. The renewed excitement came after a colleague pointed me towards the Magic Carpet. Bringing together physics and 3D like this is very impressive and I’m all over figuring out how to leverage it and over the next few weeks I plan to keep this page up to date with what I find out. After downloading the class packages and playing around, one question that came to mind was how to catch mouse events so I could interact with the 3D?

The answer I learn, is an event called MouseEvent3D, built into Away, which means the 2 dimensional x,y co-ordinates can be converted into the x,y,z co-ordinates of the 3D world. There is also a set of functions which allow mouse events to be attached to objects in the 3D world. With this in mind, extremely rich and immersive flash experiences are on the cards.