/Still_Alive

Still Alive (or "Vale Florestar", "Vale Natureza", and finally "Natureza Viva", in its original Brazilian Portuguese) was an online campaign by Brazilian mining company Vale do Rio Doce. This project's aim was to showcase the company's reforestation efforts to the general public, as they were the largest investor in environmental causes in the country.

Beautifully designed by Victor Sahate, the main experience in this website features a stitching mesh with a dead tree as its background. Visitors can virtually "stitch" away at the mesh, revealing a tree that's full of life as well as hidden wild animals that are "saved" once they're completely revealed, in a game-like experience.

If all animals are revealed by a visitor, their names are then saved to a list of people who symbolically helped the cause, and exposed in the website.

One of the coolest features of this website was the cooperative aspect of it. Using a socket server, up to 8 users could be sharing a "room" and virtually stitching the same mesh at the same time. Visitors could see other visitor's actions (as well as their mouse cursor positions) as they used the website, making it clear that they were not alone in their efforts to reveal the hidden figures in the mesh.

This was a great looking experience and a very challenging yet fun project. It was also my first commercial project using Flash Media Server. Defining a multiuser protocol for real time communication was something I had to do several times more after this.

The experience also contains a surprisingly amount of artificial intelligence: if you join the website when there's no one around to stitch with you, or if you're visiting it from a network that blocks socket Flash (RTMP) communication, the website creates "bots" that simulate a real person moving the mouse and stitching (generally, just moving around the stitching area randomly, which simulates visitor behavior surprisingly well). In good multiplayer bot fashion, these bots leave the website when a real person joins.