Hi.. I want to utilise the 3dwall feature of cooliris, the physics effects of the icons in bumtop to design an application for making the image viewing more intuitive and interactive. I dont want to use flash as it would slow down the speed for interaction on desktop. PLease could someone tell me about
choice of
1.) physics engine - physx or ODE for the physics effects like bumtop
2.) opengl or direct 3d
3.) WPF(windows presentation Format) - what is its use
Flash with Actionscript 3 is the best for such things. Checkout http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/3dwall/ for an illustration of CoolIris type application in Flash.
WPF is great for building application like this. VS2008 doesn't provide solution for good visualization, but you can always call for help Blend included in MS Expression. There you can select silverlight project for building fancy web applications (silverlight.net/showcase). At start, combining different controls and trigger events to start simulations is entirely included. Yes, inside Blend you can set frame keys like in flash. It's certainly a lots of effort, but it don't need to be. Recently new set of WIN RadControls for WinForms and Silverlight are issued and they look, believe me, excellent. You can look for Run Demo program which shows example of using these controls. Under section Integration, Carousel and others you will see what you looking for and beyound.