syncRage develops TGE based presentation platform
by Robert Norris · 05/11/2007 (3:21 am) · 8 comments
The TGE based application "Retail Horizons. Mall" was presented to the public for the first time at a Wincor Nixdorf exhibition in spring 2007. This project was produced in cooperation with visios gmbH at the end of 2006. The application is operated via touchscreen and is easy to use as the video shows.
I can not embed the videos directly but the links take you to our website where the videos can be viewed.
View exhibition video.
The "Retails Horizons. Mall" is a shopping centre, in which products and services from Wincor Nixdorf in various shops and other buildings are visualised as animated scenes. An intuitive user interface offers the user a quick introduction into the products and services from Wincor Nixdorf.
View showreel.
I can not embed the videos directly but the links take you to our website where the videos can be viewed.
View exhibition video.
The "Retails Horizons. Mall" is a shopping centre, in which products and services from Wincor Nixdorf in various shops and other buildings are visualised as animated scenes. An intuitive user interface offers the user a quick introduction into the products and services from Wincor Nixdorf.
View showreel.
#2
05/11/2007 (5:00 am)
Most of her problem seemed to be that, considering the height of the screen, she was vertically challenged.
#3
05/11/2007 (5:00 am)
And that menu button is ...way... up there:) Looks cool though.
#4
The adults attending the show did not have any problems with the height of the screen. Adults did not get the fact that it was a touchscreen - they just watched it like TV. The application navigates itself if no one is using it and they thought that was it. The children did not think any further and just started clicking objects with their hands.
We plan to revise the GUI so that a finger touches the objects when it is on auto-pilot.
05/11/2007 (5:28 am)
These are fair points. She found the menu though ;-)The adults attending the show did not have any problems with the height of the screen. Adults did not get the fact that it was a touchscreen - they just watched it like TV. The application navigates itself if no one is using it and they thought that was it. The children did not think any further and just started clicking objects with their hands.
We plan to revise the GUI so that a finger touches the objects when it is on auto-pilot.
#5
05/12/2007 (8:39 am)
I think with the few fixes you already have in mind you'll have a nice little set up there. Are you planning on marketing this to other vendors to try to build this for more and more malls? Or design it for a "map" system that you could design and build malls in quickly?
#6
05/13/2007 (6:26 am)
I appreciate the interest Jason. We are indeed marketing this to other vendors. The application was designed to be very modular; the UI, menus and in-scene navigation, is generated from the mission file. Adding new buildings, stores and processes is very easy. The majority of the work is producing the animations. We are currently working on an extension to this mall and talks have started with other vendors who want their own malls. TGE's editors make it easy to make changes without the need to release a new version of the executable. This makes it an attractive proposition where customer wishes can be quickly incorporated.
#7
05/13/2007 (1:44 pm)
That makes sense, so then will you develop an easier method to make your animations? Modularize it?
#8
05/15/2007 (5:19 am)
The animations are currently created in Maya. The characters you see are not players as such, just one of many meshes in the .dts that houses each process animation. This lumping everything together leads to some problems with transparent objects that do not get sorted (sorting is SceneObject based) correctly so for the moment we are avoiding these. I could imagine a more 'machima' approach working well but we would need to provide good tools which is a tough sell for artists used to animating in tools such as 3DS Max and Maya.
Torque 3D Owner James
:)