NHS Change Day Actions Map

As part of the NHS Change Day 2015 project, a requirement was to provide a visual representation of the actions which had be collected through the website and their distribution across the country to show the regional activity of change that was happening

Postcode information is captured as part of the user registration process which is then converted into geographical longitude and latitude coordinates for representation on the 3D map. The real-time action information along with the geographical coordinates are retrieved from the server using REST service and the locations represented by green light bulbs land on the country's surface.

The UK map model is static a object with textures containg baked shadows and ambient occlusion. The bulbs are simple planes with lightbulb texture with a transparent region around it's edge. Each individual bulb is created as a particle in the Away3D particle system and has a custom billboarding control to ensure that it faces the camera at all times however remains perpendicular to the surface if the UK map. The bulbs and trails are positioned randomly vertically above a specific height to allow them to fly down to the surface. Once the bulb hits the surface a small 'blast' area expands at the point of contact.

As this applicaiton was to function across both desktop and mobile/tablet devices, OpenFL/Haxe was used to create a Flash Player version for desktop web and a HTML5/WebGL version for mobiles/tablets as Flash is not available for these platforms.

Key developments:

  • OpenFL/Haxe used to target Flash and WebGL
  • Away3D OpenFL port used for all 3D
  • Away3D OpenFL Particle system utilised with custom Particle States/Nodes
  • Baked shadows and ambient occlusion on textures

NHS-IQ : http://www.nhsiq.nhs.uk/
NHS Change Day 2015: http://changeday.nhs.uk/nhsactionsmap