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.

Mystery Clock

The look of this clock is inspired by the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot. The clock uses the Actionscrip2 Model-View-Controller pattern as implemented in Colin Moock's 'Essential Actionscript 2'.

I have added a few of my own ideas to this beyond simply changing the look of the clock. The biggest change is that I have removed the need for the mx.Controls.Button component, reducing the file size from 108Kb to 13Kb. This type of saving would be very useful in a widget application which is deployed across social networks and download many times each day. To make this work, I extended the MovieClip class, allowing listeners to subscribe to the onRelease event. These movieclips act more like ActionScript 3 DisplayObjects in that they now implement the EventDispatcher interface.