Webcam Keepy-Uppy Worldcup game for The Netherlands released
Over the past couple days we’ve built a keepy-uppy game here at theFactor.e to celebrate the win of Holland in the Worldcup. Unfortunately it didn’t go our way and we came in second. So the game is now great to take your mind off the loss.
I used the great face recognition code Marilena. This awesome bit of AS3 code is based on some older work done in C: OpenCV. Once I knew where the face was I added a little bit of physics. Using 2d ball on ball collision I can make the ball bounce of your head in the right way. To see how these collisions work check this page.
Have fun playing the game. And for the non-Dutch speaking visitors just click ‘webcam’ to play with your webcam (duh) and ‘muis’ to play with your mouse. Play the theFactor.e Keepy Uppy game here.
Getting started with multitouch in AIR 2.0 and Player 10.1 on the Macbook
I decided to have a look at the latest beta players for AIR 2.0 and FP 1.5 with regards to multitouch. Lee Brimelow has a great multitouch tutorial on his site, check it out.
In order to get it to work you need a Macbook with multitouch pad. I use the latest pro model, courtesy of theFactor.e 
.
- You need to download the beta runtime plus sdk which you can get here.
- Install the runtime. This is the easy part.
- Setup the sdk like they explain here. I’ve got it setup so I can export from Flash.
- Create a new Flash AIR project.
- If you would use any of the TransformGestureEvents now it will throw an error. But export the file anyway.
- Open the xml file that Flash just exported next to your swf (Multitouch-app.xml in my case).
- Change the line that define the name space so it uses the 2.0 beta name space:
<application xmlns=”http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/2.0beta2″> - Save the xml and try exporting the Flash file again. It should work a charm now.
I’ve uploaded the source for you to play with here. And if you just want to see the AIR app download that here. It only works on a Macbook with multitouch pad or some other fancy multitouch device running Windows 7. Enjoy!
Big thanks to Lee Brimelow and the Internets
Moving from London to Leeuwarden
After spending 5 years in London of which the last 4 years with the great people of Digital-Outlook it was time to move on and return to the Netherlands. I had a great time with Digital-Outlook, it is a great group of people who really understand their audience and know how to party. So if you’re in London and you’re looking for a great place to work give them a call.
But there are some cool new challenges ahead as well. I’ve joined theFactor.e which is a very well established company in Holland. They’ve set up a new business unit focused on casual and serious games in Leeuwarden. They brought me in as the games and social media specialist.
It’ll be really cool and challenging at the same time to setup this part of the business. I’ve worked here for 3 weeks now and am already enjoying it. What makes this place extra special is the link with Gameship. This is a high end motion capture studio that sits in the building I’m working in and is co-owned by theFactor.e. Pretty cool to have the possibility to do awesome stuff with it.
Mocap Studio Gameship
Having fun with Face Tracking and MP3 Pitch control
There is a lot of cool open source stuff coming out this year in the Flash community. Earlier this year we saw the Flash Face Tracking and 2 months ago Andre Michelle showed how easy it was to control the pitch of a sound in Flash 10. I love all that stuff.
So I though, what can I build to have a little fun with all this open source loveliness. A webcam/mic driven pan flute of course!
Here is the source from this experiment.
Alice in Wonderland Papervision site is live
Great day yesterday. After all the hard work my colleague Graham and I put in, the site for the new Tim Burton movie has finally gone live.
Alice in Wonderland screen shot
For this project we wanted to showcase the characters in a way that made sense for the movie. So we came up with the idea of having them fly past while you (Alice) are falling down the rabbit hole.
The site is my 3rd Papervision site and I’m starting to understand more and more about creating a good working site using this technology. It is really important to re-use your objects and keep an eye on the memory used. If you’re not careful, you can grind a site to a halt quite easily.
The tunnel texture is a looping Movieclip that I put on a cylinder. The camera is inside this cylinder. Then I have a bunch of flat planes with things like a watch, a chair, a crown etc mapped on top of them. They fly past and as soon as they go off screen, they loop back from the bottom again.
The main object of course is the picture frame. I first started off with just a box but that didn’t give the right feel. So I created this more detailed shape that has all the edges and depth of a real picture frame. Graham then created the textures and I put it all together. I love how much more depth it gives the frame.
I use the interactive moviematerial for the front (character) and back (downl0ads) sections. I then added the neat things like the FileReference style download of the icons, so we didn’t need a popup.
Have a look at the site here: http://www2.disney.co.uk/DisneyMovies/alice/
WordPress blog crash…
3 weeks ago I got a message from the people that host my site. During a backup procedure of the server they lost power. Everything went wrong that could go wrong which resulted in both backups being corrupt. What that meant for me was that my whole blog was gone…
That’ll teach me to make backups from my database. Luckily Google cache helped me out retrieving a lot of posts. I’ve put most of the blog back together but unfortunately you can’t re-date a new blog post with WordPress so all the links that were on other site to my blog are now broken. I’m rebuilding some of the pages on their original links. Like the link that Mario Klingemann made to my Game of Life
Silly webcam motion tracking thingy
I was cycling home today and had a bit of a random idea on how it would be funny to track motion using the webcam and use that to move a set of eyes around. As if the person on screen could actually see you.
Anywaysss, quick half hour later and you can see the result below. Download the source if you like. Have fun playing!
Move from left to right. Or just sit still and move your left hand or right hand. You’ll figure it out.
Kaleidoscope fun in Flash. Now with superfast image export!
I found this supercool Adobe AS3 library that uses ByteArray to export images superfast. The only thing the PHP does is put a header on it and serve it up. Wicked.
And what better way to test that than building a webcam Kaleidoscope. Hours of fun! Here is the source if you’re interested.
Baby steps with the Arduino Board
I’ve started playing around with the Arduino board after I saw people do cool stuff with it. What makes it really interesting for me is that you can hook it up to Flash.
There are loads of great documentation and experiments out there. Couple highlights:
- Arduino homepage
- Great first tutorial, I just did the first 3 lessons of this one. Very clear.
- Arduino and Flash
- Seb’s experiments with Flash particles & Arduino
Got my first little ‘Hello World’ project working:
Next step, Flash controlling the real word and vice versa 
Tag Cloud
Blogroll
- Bram Perry Fun with generative art
- Dino Burbidge My inspirational creative director from Digital Outlook
- James Alliban Guy that does cool webcam stuff with Flash
- Nic in Friesland Blog Blurbs and Recipes from the Middle of Nowhere