Interesting Flash Shopping
by Jessica Clark
http://www.maccosmetics.com/fafi/index.tmpl?ngextredir=1
User Experience at Google
by Gagan Diesh
Most of you probably have no idea who I am. So a little intro: I used to teach UX and Branding at VFS. I was browsing through the blog and saw a lack of UX on here, and thought I would share an old RSS feed that I find useful:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=techtalks&output=rss
(if you don’t use RSS feeds, have someone brilliant like Brett show you how. Firefox can help, and so can NetNewsWire on a Mac)
A rather long, but still useful talk that explains some of the design decisions at Google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1450499518437881077
Multi-touch Window Time-lapse
by Brett Forsyth
It has been too long since I have posted any news about the multi-touch. As some may know the FTIR MT I built for the program is up and running and I have started to teach how to use/develop for it. It still isn’t finished in terms of the build and definitely isn’t much to look at yet (which is why I haven’t posted photos). Several students are working on software for it this term and I will post video at the end of term when they are done.
It is no secret that I am also in the process of developing a diffuse illumination multi-touch screen. This one is going to be huge 130″ diagonal and 16:9 aspect. On Thursday I finally got it working on a much smaller scale and shot some HD footage. Here is a 1 minute time-lapse of some of the tests.
DI Multi-touch Window Test from Brett Forsyth on Vimeo.
WAVEscape
by Aaron Bell
I’m not sure how many of you folks keep up with the activities of CES (probably a lot!), but I wanted to mention a project that my brother developed with his company, Reactrix. Originally, Reactrix was involved in overhead-mounted displays that one walks over and causes a reaction in the image projected below. However, at CES, they released something called WAVEscape, which uses some sort of system to identify objects in 3d space in front of the screen and allows people to interact with the screen similar to a multitouch display, but without actually touching anything.
All in all, it is a pretty nifty creation!
Here is a sample video:
Also see Gizmodo’s article and related video and C|NET’s article about the product and its applications.
Holy Cow!!! Lego ROCKS!!
by Jessica Clark
OMG, I am soooo excited by this… 
If you don’t know about this already, check out Lego Factory
In a nutshell, its software that you can download that lets you “play lego” with infinite bricks, BUT (and this is the completely awesome part) you can actually BUY the thing that you created in the 3D software- they will mail you all the bricks you used. It auto-calculates the price of the creation you are designing in real time as you build.
If that wasn’t cool enough, it lets you upload your finished design so that other people can buy the set you created too! Drool…
Alright, I think I’ve outted myself as a nerd enough for one post… Time to play!
(an example of a design by someone online- $399 CDN to buy all the bricks used in this one)
Multitouch-ify Things
by Aaron Bell
This video is rather awesome, partially for his creativity and partially for the great range of possibilities that this sort of technology opens up. I was rather impressed, myself, with the Wii Remote’s capabilities as a techie tool. Seems that Wii Remote hacks have gone down in popularity on the internet, so seeing this piece out of the blue is rather shiny.
Ultimately, I feel that for small, handheld devices such as touchscreen laptops or items such as the iPhone, this sort of technology won’t make much of a difference. I know for myself, actually touching the screen on those objects makes a big difference for feeling that one actually has an influence and interaction with the device. However, for a future, large-scale, display-based computers that could emerge in the future, this sort of interaction would be rather essential. If one could develop a methodology for determining positioning and movement across a large space, it would be a giant leap forward.
All in all, I think this is rather awesome and I look forward to seeing where things go from here.
Flash Sound Visualizer
by Tyler Egeto
hello everyone. Last term one of my big focuses was on a flash project called “Visual Sound”. This was a exploratory project for me which introduced a few new technologies and jammed them together. The first challenge I faced with this project was the migration from Action Script 2 to Action Script 3. Before I could do anything I had to start all over with the basics and teach my self the new (and better) language, which was extremely enjoyable.
The second phase of this was an exploration into a technology called Papervision3D. I won’t get into specifics, (check it out here) but it allows us to put 3D into flash.
The third thing was into a physics engine called Ape Physics. (see it here)
And thirdly I had to combine them all together and and attach them to audio information at flash player run time. The results are interesting. So what is happening in the program is that flash loads the audio files in and reads the data in it, like its wave form. From there I take that information and use it to create a visual representation of it. The final result is pretty neat. Overall this was a very satisfying project for me, and forced me to learn a lot.
Make sure to move the mouse around, in most of the examples you can interact with the visualization. Pushing the mode button will switch between two different modes, one reads the audio’s frequency data, and the other reads its amplitude. The first visualizer does a good job of showing this difference.
Funny e-store.
by Bart Barlowski
This e-store created a really cool intro. Anyone know how flash tells the browser to scroll?
Final Project - Generative Engine
by Aaron Bell
After a couple days rest to not think about my project, I thought I would post it up here for everyone to take a look at if you’re so inclined!
To use the application, you will need a computer microphone and Flash Player 9 installed. Be sure to read the instructions if you get confused.
This project had a great deal of development behind it. In just coding alone, I exceeded 190 hours of work. In total, I got up to around 330 hours. At the same time, it was an awesome experience and it really gave me the opportunity to explore generative media and push myself to produce the very best project. I really look forward to further developing this project into the future with new options and concepts that I just didn’t have time to explore in the limited time frame.
Here is some sample pieces that have come out of my engine:
If you have any questions or comments, drop me a line.
Final Project - Amepi video tutorials.
by Bart Barlowski
Today is the deadline for dd08 final project submissions so I decided to post what I have been working on for the past 2 months. This website represents a concept of sharing video tutorials in a web 2.0 styled environment. This final project was a great experience for me, I learned a lot and improved my skills in designing a simple and usable website. Unfortunately this website is not functional. To make this into a working, functional site it would require a developer to work on the back-end of it. The best rated tutorials enable its author to promote his own DVD on the site. Hope you like the concept - any comments are welcome!
