Posts under Interactive

A couple weeks ago I created a toy for Vimeo. Vimeo toys a basically an interesting way to visualise a live activity feed. I’m excited to say that they loved my toy and they have featured it in their forums. You can view the toy by clicking the image above, or see the forum post here.

As most people may know, Adobe released CS5 last week and with it Flash CS5 which now has built in native multitouch events. As an experiment with these new APIs I decided to rework my AS3 coverflow into a multitouch music player using gestures to scroll through album covers. Below you can watch a quick video I recorded of it in action. The basic controls are as follows:

• Use two fingers touch and and scroll through albums
• Single finger tap on cover to reveal songs
• Single finger tap song to play
• Two finger tap on song list to play ablum
• Simple drag and drop songs into playlist

The performance is quite good with the camera in the MT screen running at 60fps, and the app running at 30fps. The advantage of using the native touch events is that the events are recieved from the Windows 7 HID driver so Windows can be controlled at the same time and the whole experience is much more seamless.

Oh and by the way… the screen I am using is a DIY 19″ LCD FTIR

Here is my latest experiment in Flash… this time its an app that takes a source image (jpg) and paints it giving it a very painterly look. You can tweak some of the settings such as brush size and blur. The image above was created using this. You can download the Air installer or source files below to have a play around with it. More examples below also!

[DOWNLOAD AIR] [SOURCE]

more examples:

Over the last week or two I have been playing around with particle systems and creating my own to learn all the maths equations behind them. Why? I was playing with Trapcode Particular and started wondering what all the maths behind it was. So I started creating my own particle system in Flash from the ground up – writing my own equations to move the particles. While they may not be the most efficient… they work pretty well and you can get some pretty cool results. The FLVs will save to the desktop as myParticles1.flv, myParticles2.flv etc.

Then I thought… man it would be cool if you could export the particle designs as videos, so I had a look around and found a FLV Recording class at http://code.google.com/p/flvrecorder/. For this this to work I had to be using Air, so I quickly moved it from Flash Player across to Air and incorporated the FLV recording. It might seem like it slows down and take while to save… but hell you can be waiting hours for AfterEffects to render.

This particle app was the reason I created the gradient slider (shown in the previous blog post). I wanted to be able to adjust the colour and alpha over time like in Trapcode Particular.  After creating the Gradient slider, my next issue was actually getting the particles to fade in the correct order and time. This was solved by using Greensocks TimelineLite and TweenLite.

Issues etc:

• The real-time render button currently does nothing except turn the quailty switch on or off, which also doesn’t work since Air currently only supports high quality (flash player supports low and medium quality as well)
• Currently FLVs won’t save with transparency (i think)
• the particles/sec slider is dodgey
• currently you can only export 1 swf per session ( i had problems with the FLVs playing back after saving more than one)
• no help screen

I could probly say more stuff but I shall end the post here. Click below to download the Air app and all the source files.

[DOWNLOAD]

examples:

Recently I have been experimenting with WiiFlash – using a Wii remote to control Flash. Below is a video of my first test app. It is a spray painting app like the WiiSpray though obviously not at featured. I will make the Flash projector file available soon.

Update 2-6-2012:

Get the app here. Note that this requires the WiiFlash server to also be running (http://wiiflash.bytearray.org/?page_id=50)

Last night I started building a shooting game in AS3 using tangible objects placed on my touch screen. This was inspired by the video I showed in the previous post. The video below shows my first test with directional shooting, though I havent added targets in yet. Since my set up uses FTIR technology I could not use fiducial markers, so I decided to build ‘active’ objects that have two IR LEDs in the bottom and a push button on top. The first LED is always on and provides location, and the second LED is controlled by the push button which triggers the gun provides the shooting angle relative to the first LED.

I decided to include a ‘CoverFlow’ browser similar to iTunes in a website concept proposal for my latest Uni project. I searched the net and couldn’t find any decent/simple cover flow examples that have been created in Flash and ActionScript 3, so I set out to make my own… heres what I’ve got so far. The images are loaded in dynamically from and external XML file.