GE’s Smartgrid website lets you have a little virtual piece of “the whole world in your hands.” Using Papervision 3d and Flash Actionscript 3, this little demo and website has opened the door to a slew of marketing ideas. From interactive T-shirts, business cards, brochures, the list goes on and on. Basically, if you can print a unique symbol on it, hold it up to a webcam, you can build your own 3D animation/space to come out of it.

For the gamers out there saying, it’s already been done before. Yes, yes it has. PS3 has The Eye of Judgement. But with this new “FLARToolKit“, any AS3 developer can create their own hologram or 3D hologram type game. They even have a downloadable source code to play around with! I can’t wait to see what people make out of this.

Apparently it works by making the camera recognize a box with certain shapes inside of it. Once the camera and script notice it’s on screen, actionscript will start playing the flash animation based on X, Y, and Z coordinates. Maybe one day we’ll be able to go to a computer store, hold a product box up to a computer camera and see what the product looks like out of the box without taking the real thing out.

To try the demo out, just go to this site, print out the PDF, follow the instructions and hold a little piece of 3D marketing.