Some eons ago, in March 2011, while working at Innobyte, I was blessed with the challenging task of creating a video configurator for one of our customers.

Back in the day when the web development industry was more about crafting than collecting user data, I was very happy to work on the thingie, because it combined the necessity of a particular set of skills which I lacked and that I wanted to learn. I dabbled a bit with Flash and other ActionScript programs before, but this was the largest Flash project I ever had to do (and will do, as Flash is dead for no reason).

It was a complex project where I learned a lot, and I’m still grateful for getting the chance to do this, as I’m super happy to randomly stumble on the project file in an old virtual machine, reason why I decided to write this article.

The project was called “Lumea Somnului” (Sleep World) by SomProduct and its main purpose was to sell bed mattresses, using a step-by-step configurator, with the help of an on-screen assistant guiding you through the steps. I have to appreciate the courage and vision of the people involved into this to make this in 2011, when websites weren’t that important for the retail industry.

Once we received the base movie from the client it was our time to start our magic. It was pretty cool at the time because it combined some really nice functionalities:

  • Loading a FLV movie file (back in the day when connections weren’t that fast, MP4 codecs, HTML5 and <video> tags were ages away)
  • Making it stop automatically at certain key points, where the configurator options would appear, and resume once an option was chosen. Also jump to various points whenever a previous step was re-selected
  • Gathering some information based on whichever options the user decided to pick
  • Turning said information into parameters that were sent to an URL, which was basically a very simple and straightforward API, masterfully coded by our programmers, which returned a product and its data.
  • The ability of pulling live data from the server (mattress details, photos, price) into the flash movie and allow the visitor to add the result to their shopping cart.

Unfortunately, that API endpoint (jsonFetcher.load("/configurator/productsconfig/index/?dimensiuni=" + dimensiuni + "&kg_suportate=" + greutate + "&grosime=" + grosime + "&tip_saltea=" + tip + "&duritate=" + duritate);) doesn’t exist anymore (OMG, I was such a noob, I was writing code in Romanian), so I can’t show a final result, but trust me that it worked.

I could also post the SWF file, but no one uses Flash anymore, so here’s the video in all its 480p glory, I’ll update the info here as soon as I find out who the actor is:

This post is a part of Agora Road’s Travelogue, an effort to promote blogging.