My first project working at Boston University was a survey of the University’s operating status and health, the Annual Report. The website supplements a mailed, custom publication that drives to the web through URLs and a USB key. As a fount of information about BU, the site attracts thousands of unique visitors.
Utilizing Papervision3D 2.0, I put together the functionality for the main index’s map, which animates over 1300 sprites brought in from Illustrator. Optimization of the test effects through the final visual effects generated by map interaction was a challenge to bring to an acceptable level, particularly with Safari in Snow Leopard as a must-function target. At the time, and still to some extent now, Safari does not handle the Flash Player plugin very smoothly, a result of the 64bit browser running a 32bit plugin. Performance suffers considerably as a result, but I was able to bring performance to an acceptable level. The rest of the site is cross browser/platform CSS/JS/XHTML and an old JW Player used by the university for a long span of time (I’m currently on the project of skinning/plugin writing/modifying JW Player 5 for future use).
The site highlights notable videos/photo slideshows and people from the past year in addition to a description of BU’s current operating finances, presence in the city, and more.
Video pages that are location specific include a small map highlighting their area alongside a description of the content.
Other videos related to the sub-page content (finances, boston, etc) appear down the right sidebar of those respective pages. The imagery along the top of the page corresponds with the first video on the list and its location.
There’s also a bit of jQuery in use to show/hide some extended content and pass information to and from the map on the homepage so that the text underneath the map and the map itself can communicate with each other.
The site is currently live at http://www.bu.edu/ar (which redirects to http://www.bu.edu/ar/2009 for future archival purposes). You can also see the site, designed by Scott Dasse, in action in the video below. Some of the map fluidity when it came to Papervision3D tasks is a bit stuttery as a result of the full screen video capture application running at the same time.
