I cobbled this webcam demo together for no other reason than creative curiosity – a half of mirrors for the information age, I guess – source
Archive for June, 2009
I started trying to find useful things to do with face detection, but with limited success. I tried using the Libspark Haar Cascades implementation of face detection with Papervision3D to create a sort of head tracking effect, but it’s a little flaky – partly because of poor tracking accuracy and partly because it’s too CPU intensive. You can view it on its own page here.
I’ve been asked a few times now to create effects that require multiple instances of the Flash Player on a page to interact and remain in sync – even with interaction. Because of this, using timed events is no good and because of harddrive thrashing (which I won’t do for what might just be some banners) you can’t use Flash cookie updates. Also, when you have more than 2 SWFs, deciding which SWF updates who becomes tricky. I came up with this solution, using LocalConnection with a twist, which works pretty well – but if anyone has a better method, drop it in a comment 
I just found this online multiplayer Flash game for Terminator Salvation. Multiuser Flash games have come a long way since I built Dinky Bomb all those years ago. The graphics are very impressive and overall I’m really impressed, though the gameplay is perhaps a little awkward. Essentially though, the best genre of multuser game for Flash seems still to be strategy over all-out action. Maybe the introduction of UDP and binary sockets to Flash 10 will change that.
Just spotted a video on James Alliban’s blog of how to make your own cheap multitouch table. It’s a lot easier if you’re not initially bothered with projecting your image back into the table – otherwise you’ll need a projector (which I don’t have) and a camera capable of infrared (which some webcams may already do without requiring modification). I for one, will be having a go…