Lonely Planet Stories - Papervision 3d, RSS and the Yahoo Local API

This was a development project using AS3 and Papervision 3D to geolocate RSS feeds with Yahoo Maps Service. It borrows heavily from an excellent article in the June 2008 edition of the Adobe Edge newsletter on geolocation and Papervision for Flex.

URL: http://www.backflip.co.uk/development/lonelyplanet/

Flash loads and then parses this rss feed from Lonely Planet
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travelstories/rss/

The contents of the Title tags in the rss xml are then sent off to Yahoo’s geocoding API
http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode

If any place names are recognised by Yahoo it sends back the longitude and latitude co-ordinates. (It often gets confused and you’ll find lots of mistakes, usually placed in North America). I originally tried to create this app using Atom feeds from BBC iPlayer but there were too few place names and Yahoo was making some really bad guesses with the data.

Meanwhile a rotating globe with moon was created using the Alpha version of Papervision 3D 2 (Great White).

An algorithm converts the Cartesian co-ordinates returned by Yahoo into spherical ones and a marker is then plotted onto the 3d map using Papervison.