I cobbled this webcam demo together for no other reason than creative curiosity – a half of mirrors for the information age, I guess – source
June, 2009
20
Jun 09
Head tracking in 3D
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.
18
Jun 09
Synchronising animation across multiple SWFs
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 
17
Jun 09
Terminator Salvation online game
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.
10
Jun 09
Multitouch for the masses
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…
3
Jun 09
How Wonderfl
I’ve been playing around a little with the online Flash building tool, Wonderfl. If you haven’t seen it already, I urge you to create an account and have a go. You can browse the weird things that people have created, fork other users’ code, or write you own from scratch and see the results compiled online in realtime. It’s a great way to learn graphics coding in AS3 I reckon.
1
Jun 09
Back from my travels
After a solid month of eating and chilling, Im back. Despite eating anything and everything that looked remotely edible, I managed to gain only a couple of kilos. Almost every meal brought with it something new and challenging to my palette, from sea snails and chicken feet, to deep fried fish heads and pig’s trotters.
I’m too lazy to sort through and upload my photos yet – instead, I am trying to get out of holiday mode and get back into training and coding :/
