Matteas: My name's Drov Matteas
from Disney/ABC Television Group.
We were approached by Google O3D team
to...
to develop kind of an interactive 3-D experience
in the browser.
We also have a developer initiative
where we're aiming to expose certain metadata
from our company to empower developers
to create experiences around our content.
And it seemed like a perfect fit
of new technology, and our APIs
kind of develop an exciting application
that fits right in the middle between that, so...
man: So can you talk a little bit more about
how you came to the technical decision to use--
working it and integrating it into your application?
Matteas: Um, yeah, I mean,
the ideation of the application came
from kind of the inspiration
of O3D and doing hardware-accelerated graphics
in the browser.
I mean, previous, we would consider doing the application
in Flash, but when we saw the demos of the performance
of O3D running in the browser,
we thought it was cool and just wanted to--
kind of experimented.
I mean, my team, we're all kind of fun tech guys ourselves
and wanted to kind of experiment ourselves,
so it was kind of a cool thing to do.
We needed, you know, we needed something fun
to kind of showcase our developer initiatives,
so it just worked out.
man: So, as developers,
we really value people who are able to share
war stories and lessons from a technical counter,
especially as O3D is kind of new.
It'd be great to get feedback, and if you could tell everyone
what you think one particularly difficult period of development
was that you faced
and how you approach the technical counter.
Matteas: Um, yeah, so the most difficulty for our team
was we have no previous experience with anything 3D.
But what we do have is a lot of experience with JavaScript.
So probably for us was the initial learning curve
of how to create the models and animate them
in 3D.
But it was actually fairly-- I mean, the whole application
was built in four to five weeks,
so it was fairly kind of rabid to get to a perfect stage
where we could start playing around
and using kind of the demos
that Google provided.
You know, it really, really helped us out.
man: Great.
Matteas: Yeah.
man: And, so I mean, how long does--
what do you see as the next steps
for your application?
Matteas: I'd love--I mean, as we add more functionality
to our API, I mean, I would just love to add that--
I mean, to basically add that to the front end as well.
You know, I think, through the process of this project,
we found a really interesting way
to use 3-D to navigate through video content
and through imagery of our video content.
So it's kind of the first steps, at least internally,
for how we can create a new interface
for our video content using 3-D.
I mean, prior to this, our websites have been very static.
Or maybe dynamic in a 2D fashion,
but adding kind of the third dimension allows us
to provide more information intuitively to the user.
So I'd like to--I mean, over the case of the summer,
really kind of blow out the functionality
of this application and maybe apply it
to more of a mainstream user base than just the developers
on our site.
man: So given what you've learned, working with O3D,
um, maybe getting some of the feedback [indistinct]
is there anything that you're going to change
based on the feedback?
Matteas: So, based on the feedback
we got from the developers
in Sandbox, if there's anything we would--
man: Based on the experience of things
that you might do differently for any visualizations--
Matteas: With application, or with O3D--
Just in general, I guess.
man: Yeah, just in general.
Matteas: Yeah, I mean, we had a lot of feedback.
I mean, in regards to O3D,
most of the feedback was how fast we got to the point
we got to, and, you know,
although we didn't have that prior 3D experience,
it was actually kind of fun to get to the point
where we are in a very short period of time.
Most of the feedback we got
in regards to our application was around larger amounts
of data being presented.
Right now, our application shows a limited set
of maybe eight or ten results.
So really kind of the problem that we're gonna now go back to
is how do we expand that to--I don't know--
maybe hundreds of results, right,
which we potentially have in our database,
so it'd be interesting to kind of play
with that interaction model.
Yeah.
Cool.
man: What's the most interesting comment--or feedback--
that you've gotten?
Matteas: Probably somebody--
some of the visual search techniques we're doing
with the video, people are, "Does ABC really know
that you're doing that?"
You know, a lot of people can't believe that,
as ABC traditionally being so protective of their content,
that we're embracing developers as we are.
Or at least attempting to, at least, now.
So that was kind of funny.
But it's very exciting to see kind of developers--
you can see them kind of come up with their ideas
and really look forward to working with stuff
that we're doing, so...
It's cool. man: That sounds really great.
Matteas: Yeah. man: Great.
Matteas: All right.