lab.lukesturgeon.co.uk

I am beginning to become more and more fascinated by particles, particle systems, physics and artificial life/intelligence algorithms. To cut a long story short I wish I knew what Keith Peters does. Following on from a tutorial he wrote in the Friends of Ed book New Masters of Flash Vol3 I have been doing my initial experiments in to particle systems starting with a basic AS2 class. Once I’ve experimented with this some more and added some cool features to it I am hoping to port the class over to AS3 and then have fun on an even larger scale.

Ideally I want to add collision detection between the particles so they do not collide with one-another, experiment with flock behavior/boids, attraction, repulsion and dynamic behavior. The flash experiment above is my initial foray in to the world of the particle!

You may or may not be aware of the annual global relaunch of websites on the internet? Each year hundreds of people subscribe to the may1reboot.com event, you might have seen that my portfolio is also included in this years event. It’s a great way to give yourself a deadline and purpose to a website re-design although the launch is now tomorrow and I am still far from completing the new website.

I have just seen that Senocular over on the Kirupa forum has created a HUGE post and continues to add new AS3 tips and tricks to it.

http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22379

After developing the interactive and standard video scrubbers I wanted to create a version that would allow me to drag and rotate an object or scene a full 360 degrees. Rather than using 3D in flash, I wanted to find a way to create the effect that would allow complex animation and effects to be created in After Effects, then exported as an image sequences and used in this 360 degree scrubber.

Again the scrubber has hot-spots which can offer more interactivity and the easing and sensitivity of the scrubber can also be adjusted.

Thanks to the great guys over at tinker.it I have been on two workshops recently to learn more about physical computing, human – computer interaction and electronics. The first workshop was lead by Alex Zivanovic and Benjamin Tomlinson who gave great introductions to physical computing, Processing, Arduino, and basic electronics. The second workshop was more specific to the communication between external devices (using Arduino) and flash lead by Alias Cummins and Brock Craft.

I was proud to have one of my early flash + arduino experiments photographed and the code for the experiment should be getting posted on the tinker.it website soon as a simple example of getting flash to communicate with the Arduino board.

I do not have a video yet of an experiment I made yet (watch this space) but I do have some photographs. I found an old PC joystick in the loft which I chopped the serial plug off and soldered some prototyping wires on to for my breadboard, I then re-wired the two potentiometers that record the joysticks X and Y position and tested the buttons. Using an AS3 library Glue, SerialProxy as a http server and Flash, I was able to use the joystick to control a particle system and use the left and right buttons to cycle through different sprites that made up the particles.

Developing the Video Scrubber further I have added ‘hot spots’ to the animation so as you drag through the video, you simultaniously drag through the hot spots as well. These can be toggled using the controls.

There are some really cool existing examples of this effect, and there are several ways that it can be developed further. The hot spots could be faded in and out when you begin to drag the video around, they could be used to skip to a certain point in the video etc.

I have been using my R&D time recently to explore better ways of creating interactive video experiences, scrolling, dragging, scrubbing and interacting with video. This prototype breaks a video in to an image sequence of around 340 jpgs, loads the jpgs in and then allows the user to scrub through the image sequence rather than trying to scrub through a flv file. This has made the experience a lot smoother and instant rather than trying to scrub backwards through flash video which is a big ‘no no’ as it kills the flash player!

I’ve just checked on the gotoandlearn.com site and noticed another Papervision3D tutorial, as I’m really hoping to try and push my development in Papervision3D it made sense to try my hand at it. I may try and create some alternate versions of this over the next weekn and explore some more of the cool features that Papervision3D 2.0 has to offer.

Another great resource is the website I am currently working through the tutorials on, papervision2.com

I have finally found time to begin experimenting with Papervision3D and ActionScript 3.0 and I am very excited about the possibilities, especially after following the fantastic new tutorial on the gotoAndLearn website.

I have been working through the first chapter of the fantastic book Flash Math Creativity from Friends of Ed. Here are some happy accidents I created after spending some time swapping and changing values and experimenting with sin and cos curves.