To showcase the hardware acceleration capabilities of Adobe’s Flash Player 11 prior to its release, the Away3D Team and Finnish demosceners EvoFlash teamed up to produce a 4 minute journey of soothing 3D experimentation.

Sparkle a moment has many elements that were new to Away3D at the time, such as procedural textures, post-processing effects and realtime phyiscs. The following synposis of the inception and execution of the ideas in the demo is written by Simo Santavirta, our creative / technical director on the project:

Into the endless darkness two light spheres are born. Slowly giving meaning and life to surroundings. In gentle moving light of spheres objects are showing their forms. Objects are symbols of science, history, society, evolution. nature, liquid and time. When a sphere come close to object it’ll be shown by the light of sphere and can become life. It can start levitate, sparkle, move, glow or break apart. Eventually spheres will light up everything. All is glamorous and flourishing. Suddenly spheres pop into little sparkles and disappear. Everything turn into deep endless darkness again.

The piece was first shown at the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles 2011.

Created in a matter of weeks for the Adobe Max 2010 conference in Los Angeles, Disconnected was one of the first realtime 3D demos to use the Flash Player’s new Stage3D APIs (codenamed “Molehill” at the time). Work was carried out in an ad-hoc exploration of ideas with a production team formed from 3D engine authors Away3D and finnish demosceners EvoFlash.

The demo was hacked together using a combination of old and new Away3D code, under the creative tutelage of demoscene veteran Simo Santavirta. Here is what he had to say about the pressures of a fast turnaround coupled with a group of highly talented individuals:

With a bunch like this the project can turn into a mayhem of creative vortex and epic battle of toes stepping. So I thought it would be essential to get everybody into same state of mind. We started by getting an agreement on the rough synopsis. After the “rough synopsis”-project (which contained a stack of extremely bizarre emails with colorful adjectives and naive romantic thoughts) I created a visual moodboard and color schema for us. When it comes to creating a demo all this preparation is good, but hardly never shape the demo too much. The final result will be what comes out after endless testing and rethinking. The best things comes out from flow and flow can be achieved by working around the subject. For coders this means coding, testing, failing, coding, thinking, playing, coding, failing, coding and enlightenment.