Sony 3D

I was lucky enough to recently re-make the Sony 3D European flagship site at Tonic.
The site supports around 25 countries, all of which need to able to localise all new and existing content as well as customise the size and style of boxes.

The site was made originally for the US market by a Japanese company, and then hacked by a number of developers so that it had become completely unmaintainable. This wasn't helped by Sony's CMS/asset server set up which really seems to be set up for banners and microsites, as opposed to this pretty huge Flash site.

I was charged with starting from scratch to create a version that could be used going forward. I really had carte blanche to approach it any way I saw fit. After a number of discussions with the Tech Director, we decided to try and remake it in Robot Legs using a very different structure than was there. Also we intergrated the build into Hudson and using Ant, got it building and deploying automatically to a test server.

Code wise it took a while to pull out the useful bits and I had to rewrite most of it.

The final product is about 10x quicker than the original (even quicker than the original Japanese version) and changes that before were taking a week could now be done in a day. All in all a great project to be involved in. It's one of the very few projects I've worked on that makes good use of Papervision and not a carousel in sight!

At the time of writing, the UK version is available to see here:
Sony 3D World