3d Barratt shop display box

J. Lester Novros II

every so often I trawl the net looking for new stuff pertaining to Supermarionation. During one of these outings I found scans from one of the shop display boxes issued by the Barratt sweets company that they used to package their sweet cigarette cards in. The owner had scanned in the top and the four sides [the bottom, apparently, was blank]. I saved them to my hard disk with the intention of incorprating them in the site at some later time.

Then, browser vendors [Apple in particular] developed a method for displaying HTML elements in 3d space and it occurred to me that this would enable me to use the box sides to once again form, well, a box. Since an illustration for the bottom was lacking, I used a sixth image I found at the same location to complete the box.

This left me with a nice perspective picture of a box but stil only showed three sides at best. What was needed was a way to rotate the box using a pointing device. I attempted to cobble together something myself but this turned out to be much harder than I anticipated: it involved complicated mathematics and if anything, I am sorely lacking in math skills. So again I turned to the net and lo and behold, after some effort, Google pointed me to Dirk Weber's excellent traqball script. Putting it all together resulted in this.

Sorry, your browser seems to be incapable
of handling the CSS needed for this effect

grab the box with your mouse to rotate it