Physics on Pixels

There are so many great Actionscript libraries now that it's hard to find time to experiment with them. This is my first foray into the popular Box2D Physics library. Working through the tutorial-like manual made picking this up a breeze although the API is not as clearly documented as PV3D so a little poking around is required to see what the available options are.

This is a quick experiment so I haven't wired it up with as many options as I'd like yet. At the moment, this is the maximum resolution I can get: there is a limit imposed on how many bodies can be simulated although I'm sure there is a workaround for that. There is no fullscreen button but clicking anywhere in the .swf will expand it for you.

Cube Grid

I extended the Autofuss Pixel Grid from a couple of posts ago to take advantage of the 3D effect that the corner triangle in the logo hints at. This runs a little slower than the original version as each 'pixel' sprite has more decisions to make on each update.

Thanks to the MVC structure I used for the original I was able to get this working just by extending the pixels view class. This made experimenting a little easier. For example, I created a version using some of Joa Ebert's optimisations including using a linked list for the pixel sprites. However, I didn't notice any significant gains in the speed of the application - perhaps due to running my tests in the debugging version of the player.

Logo Slicer

One of my favourite things I've seen at Autofuss while I've been working there is a logo animation Chris Kelly put together in After Effects. Triangles, like the one in the corner of the logo, slide around behind and in front of various mask layers, eventually coming together to reveal the logo.

I could see how this could be made interactive by allowing the user to slice up the logo themselves. In this simple demo, the logo shatters into triangles when the mouse moves through it. The speed of the movement determines the size, number and velocity of the triangles.

Augmented Reality with Multiple Markers

I've put up a few examples of my work at Autofuss, using the FLAR toolkit to display different models based on the identity of the pattern in view. This was a pretty big project so I won't go into the details here, click this link to go to the project site.

I haven't seen anyone else use the toolkit in this way before so if anyone is interested in seeing how I did this, post a comment and I'll find somewhere to put up the code.

Text Explosion

I've been working on a new, fancier site to showcase my Flash work. This is a short experiment for a text effect I am planning to include. It's nice to be able to post something that looks good after just 15 minutes of work!

Pixel Grid

I have been doing some work for a newly formed video production company, Autofuss. These guys are very professional and have been involved in some pretty stunning campaigns which have aired nationally. This pixel grid has come out of my efforts to also get people thinking of Autofuss for interactive media production.

The basic technique expands on David Wicks' dice mirror. It takes advantage of Adobe's Pixel Bender technology to rapidly produced a binary filtered image from the webcam. The resulting 1s and 0s determine which version of the logo is displayed at each location.

I used Flash's native components to build the menu panel which certainly simplifies the task of addding in interactivity. This was nice and easy to add in as this application is built on an AS3 version of the MVC framework I used for the Warhawk widget. I think my favourite settings so far involve a green background, low resolution and a good amount of padding.

I have added a greyscale version of the grid here.

Warhawk Leaderboard: Version 2

This is the updated version of the Warhawk stats widget I posted a while ago. It's been through a lot of changes with 2 new modes: Head-2-Head and MyStats which let the user chose which players' data to display. There's also more control over how the data is sorted and which fields are displayed. The data itself can be displayed as text values or as a bar chart.

Although I did all of the coding and design myself, I discussed the design and functionality of the widget with people at Eike Consulting before starting this new version of the widget. One thing that was very important was to ensure that this would run on the Playstation 3. This meant I had to work within the constraints of Flash Player 7. We also anticipated this being downloaded thousands of times each day so I wanted to keep the file size as small as possible. By removing the Accordion component, I ended up with a smaller file than the original version.

The whole widget is built on an extension of the MVC framework I used for the Mystery Clock. This should allow me to easily add new or change existing functionality without breaking the widget.