How I’m Saving Healthcare
by Paolo on Mar.12, 2010, under News
I admit that I’m pretty burnt out after these three long years of pushing through some hellish deadlines. So I’m more than reveling seeing the fruit of my labor in these GE Healthcare ads. I especially love seeing my Silverlight mapping components (and game-like 3D transforms) put on prominent display as well as the results of my data mining being used to help hospitals.
I still want to do more.
2 comments for this entry:
March 12th, 2010 on 1:18 pm
Hey Paolo, that looks pretty sharp. So the 3D was just 2D with a 3D transform applied? I wondered for a minute if you had some sort of 3D scenegraph in there. For the past year and a half I worked on a large desktop app that used WPF for the UI and a traditional native C++ scenegraph for the 3D stuff. But now I’m doing more web app kind of work, and it looks like we might be using Flash for that, rather than Silverlight. It encourages me to know that other people have day jobs that sometimes consume their life!
March 12th, 2010 on 1:33 pm
Hi Brian,
Silverlight 1.0 was all Javascript, so there wasn’t enough performance horsepower to do something with true 3D. I faked the 3D by first rotating and scaling the map into an isometric position and then used the 2D polygon information to fake a 3D extrusion.
One of the problems I had was trying to get the walls to draw from back to front to make the walls appear correct in the isometric view. But because of limited time and computational power, I kept it simple by making the walls semi-transparent.
The effect makes it look 3D, when in reality it is a simple 2D drawing trick and all done in Javascript.
Looking back at the code… I can’t believe that I programmed it.