We’re currently working on a number of Augmented Reality projects which should see the light of day in the New Year. We were also recently approached by prestigious design magazine Wallpaper, to produce a series of Augmented Reality applications for their very first AR issue.

We didn’t have very long to build them and there was a fair bit of overtime involved but the end result was worth it. The piece was directed by Noah Harris at Blinkart with 3D modelling by Glassworks.

So rush out and buy the magazine and then go here to interact with the applications.

Over the past couple of months I’ve had the chance to get in a bit of research and development time with Unity, and one of the areas I have looked at is Augmented Reality. By far the most entertaining experiment so far has been my “AR Driving” demo. It could be said that this particular demo isn’t strictly AR (because it doesn’t overlay graphics on the video stream) but still, it uses AR technology to map the orientation of an AR marker to the steering, acceleration and braking of a car. I recently demoed it in our London office, result: Fun!

The demo works by reading the orientation of a single AR marker printed on an A4 sheet. The sheet is folded so that the marker is visible to the camera on one side, and a steering wheel image is visible on the other side – so the user knows which way up to hold the paper!

The rotation around the Z axis (as in, turning the steering wheel) is mapped to the car steering, although not entirely linearly – in order to make the controls easy to use it required a few tweaks, such as smoothing out the sometimes jittery raw data, and giving bias to a ‘not-quite-dead zone’ around the zero-degrees rotation area to make it easier to drive the car in a straight line.

The acceleration and braking controls are implemented by reading the “tilt” of the marker around the X axis. Holding the marker straight-on to the camera gives the equivalent of a steady gentle press on the accelerator. Tilting the top edge towards the camera pushes down the accelerator, while tilting it away releases the accelerator completely and applies the brakes.

The final result is a fairly intuitive driving control, and most people who had a try in the office seemed to find the car responsive and easy to control on their first try, as the video shows!

After the success of my Augmented Reality business card application I was fortunate enough to be invited to Adobe MAX 2009 in LA by the O’Reilly guys, to talk about my experiences with AR. Here are my impressions of the conference.

The keynote kicked the conference off with a real bang. These initial talks are renowned for being fairly dull affairs but Adobe pulled out all the stops to make this one something to behold. It started with an incredible dance performance by one of Adobe’s charitable endeavours, the Peapod academy. A discussion on the developments of the Flash platform followed. This included discussions of the new features built into AIR, a sneak look into the the latest developments in the openscreen project and a discussion of ColdFusion and LiveCycle with a look at some extraordinary enterprise projects. The climax was the announcement (after a hilarious Apple slanging Myth-Busters take off) that Apple was now accepting Flash applications into the App store. Now this isn’t exactly Flash in the iPhone browser but it’s certainly a positive step forward.

But by far the most awe-inspiring spectacle was the extended screener of James Cameron’s Avatar. A pair of 3D glasses, a 6th row seat and a massive 50ft screen heightened the experience to the point where I literally shivered in my seat. The producer John Landau passionately introduced each scene and discussed the extent to which Adobe software was used in the making of the movie.

Although there was a vast amount of sessions, as an interactive artist and non-Flex using Actionscript developer, I initially struggled to fill my schedule. There was a whole host of top flight Flash developers such as Ralph Hauwert and Andre Michell (regulars on the Flash conference circuit) missing from the list. However, the day before the conference started, I learned that Influxis had flown a bunch of them over to talk at the FITC Unconference sessions. For me, this development filled several gaps and led to my schedule being significantly reshuffled.

My main highlights included:

Joshua Davis was as inspirational and entertaining as ever in his Space talk. His latest experiments and influences were explained with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, impressive for a 9am slot. I enjoyed watching the developments of each project from initial idea through to the finished product. His investigation into bezier curves was fantastic, as was his installation and iPhone work. This will be Joshua’s last speaking engagement for 2 years as he plans to have a well deserved rest.

Being an Augmented Reality monkey, I was inevitably going to end up attending Tomohiko Koyama AKA Saqoosha and Yoshihiro Shindo’s talk on FLARToolkit and the Japanese open source Flash community the Spark Project. It was great to hear about the history of the project and the inner workings of the AR library from the guy who wrote it. Almost as impressive was the huge tea-cosy like bear hat that he wore throughout the talk and for the rest of the day. I had a chat with Saqoosha afterwards and gushed like a schoolgirl whist droning on about how much I loved using his code library. He didn’t seem to mind. Nice guy.

A few great FITC Unconference sessions followed. Seb-Lee Delisle wowed us all with his playful work. Highlights of the talk included a look at his 5kb 3D Lunar Lander game, a walk through his fantastic 3D Big and Small website and participating in a 3D version of Pong with the rest of the audience. Ralph Hauwert was up next. Ralph is one of, if not the top 3D Flash developer on the planet. By the end we were all stunned by his experiments with fluidic, dynamically lit, interactive geometric shapes. And all this in Flash, and at a very high frame rate. Koen de Weggheleire was up next with a talk on some of the latest features in Flash Player 10. He deserves a special mention for dancing around like a crazed baboon to cheesy house music whilst demonstrating the TriangleMesh feature. Sheer entertainment.

The Adobe MAX awards ceremony followed with special guest Mark Hamill. An inspired choice considering the crowd, Hamill was highly entertaining throughout. We left before the sneak peaks to get ready for the evening but I was later reliably informed that one of the Adobe guys did some live coding dressed in a Chewbacca costume. Wild.

The MAX Bash followed and was an impressive affair. Adobe had taken over almost every establishment in the L.A. Live park. In addition to a Star Wars themed area, complete with Chubacca and Darth Vadar exhibits, Mark Hamill joined the party and was predictably mobbed the moment he arrived. Later that night we met up with some great guys from Sapient and had a ball at the Latin club.

The following morning was my talk, Augmented Reality in the Flash Player with Jesse Freeman. Both halves went very well, we got an above average rating and there were plenty of questions and positive feedback afterwards. Jesse introduced the FLARToolkit library and discussed some of his own work with limitations and the future of FLAR. My half was a discussion of my experiences with FLAR and a discussion of promotion in the field My advice for anyone planning a presentation – make sure you have lots of comical images in your slide show. There’s nothing like a few cheap gags to get the audience on your side. A bit of research is also useful.

I’m pleased to say that we had an above average rating for the talk and had a great write up on digitalarts.co.uk.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief after, I ventured out to see a few of the other MAX talks. The best of the day was A Deep Dive into 10 Innovative Projects for Flash by Thibault Imbert and Michaël Chaize. Some of the better projects were Tomek Augustyn’s face tracking library, HiSlope, due for release soon, and the WiiFlash server which allows Flash developers to use WiiMotes, Nunchuks and Wii Boards as input devices. Another great talk included Kevin Hoyt’s Integrating Flash and Hardware. In a nutshell this session explained how to use a variety of different sensors in Flash using electronics equipment. A must for any aspiring installation artist.

Although initially it was a struggle to find relevant sessions, I was consistently impressed with the scale and quality of the event, the welcoming and informative staff and (in the end) the range of talks on Flash. My fiance Juliet Lall accompanied me, and found the talks on After Effects and Illustrator to be very helpful. I would definitely recommend Adobe MAX to the typical user of Adobe’s range of software. And if Influxis continue to invite the top Flash guys I would recommend it to the atypical rest.

Ever since I joined Skive, I’ve been producing 3D games for the web, using Director and Shockwave (not to be confused with the Flash plug-in, which is sometimes referred to as “Shockwave Flash”). I started developing 3D games in 2002, and in the early days, Shockwave’s capabilities were so far ahead of its time that the main consideration was whether the average home user would even have the hardware required to run the game at all.

Some of the 3D Shockwave games we've produced at Skive

Since then however, much to the disappointment and frustration of many Shockwave developers, upgrades to Shockwave’s 3D and game-related capabilities have been almost completely negligible. At the time of writing, Shockwave still has pretty much the same 3D feature set that it had in 2001, and we are now in almost exactly the opposite situation, where most modern computers – even cheap home PCs – have advanced 3D graphic capabilities which the now antiquated Shockwave plug-in simply cannot make full use of.

Adobe claim that their long-term plans include making Director “the preferred environment for games creation”, however until they release a clear roadmap or a significant upgrade in this area, we can only speculate as to what this means.

I recently had the opportunity to research and evaluate some of the modern alternatives for a new project, and of these, “Unity 3D” emerged as a clear winner. I had been keeping an eye on a few of the 3D alternatives over the recent years, but it wasn’t until I actually got stuck in and started developing in Unity 3D that I realised the extent to which it feels ‘alive’ as a tool. The community is buzzing with new ideas and talent, the company is responsive and easily approachable, and the engine’s capabilities are modern and expansive.

Unity 3D - The Editor

As well as the obvious graphical advantages that come with a modern 3D engine, there are many other features which throw Director’s shortcomings into stark contrast. Here are just a few:

• Supports C#, a modern professional programming language. In addition, you can work on the code in Visual Studio, which sweetens things even more.
• Very active forums, with many Unity engineers and product specialists contributing regularly.
• A user feedback system where ideas and feature requests can be added and voted on. Members of the technical team actually comment on these ideas, and some of them do end up getting implemented!
• A public roadmap. They tell you what they’re working on, and roughly when it’s due for release.
• New communities are growing around the technology. People are tweeting and blogging about Unity. There are typically 40-80 users in the IRC channel at any given time (including regular Unity staff). By contrast, the community around Director feels as though it has been dwindling since around 2004, and of those remaining, a high percentage are old-timers.

So now, having completed my first (rather large) Unity 3D project, I’ve come away very impressed with Unity – with both the product itself, and with the company and community that comes with it! And on that note, I’m hoping to dedicate a little more time to such things as blogging about my experiences, experiments and research over the next few months.

Here is a run-down of the most interesting talks:

Day 1

After the interesting keynote which was kicked off a Mexican band, a few of us went to see Visualising Voice: Using the Flash Microphone for advanced interaction by Chuck Freeman. Chuck discussed his quest to persuade Adobe to extend the microphone feature in Flash whilst impressing us with his examples and research.

Dr Woohoo! was next up. We were all blown away by just how much incredible work this guy was doing and his imaginative combination of technology. In one example was using face tracking in openFrameworks to plot 3D points in Maya. These point where then used to create a stunning digital painting of 3D ribbons. Impressive stuff.

The inspiration session that evening was Epiphany by Joel Gethin Lewis. This was right up my street as an interactive artist with visions of grandeur. He introduced us his impressive body of work which included the Massive Attack sound reactive light shows, the world’s first interactive Christmas lights on Regent St and the breathtaking interactive multi-screen floor, Contact.

DAY 2

Leaving the Sandbox by Joa Ebert resulted in a thoroughly well deserved standing ovation, and the longest round of applause I’ve ever heard. The guy is working on some truly intense frameworks including a plug-in for eclipse that checks code for any possible optimisation and a library to manipulate and optimise ActionScript Bytecode. He also showed us his AS3 decompiler which automatically generates UML diagrams and class hierarchies. He finished off by compiling a SWF from C# and then another from Java! He nonchalantly mentioned that he knocked it up in his room the day before.

Hacking the newsroom by Jeremy Thorp was up next. Jeremy guided us through his Data Visualisation experiments that came from toying with the New York Times API and Processing. His work was both beautiful and informative. I found it fascinating how his visualisations would reveal trends of public thought in relation to events and periods of time.

The inspiration session was Choose your own adventure by Craig Swan. This was just the most awe-inspiring talk and one of the best of the conference. It was a personal journey in which we were introduced to the phenomena that is Cymatics, the formation of fractals and patterns from sound waves vibrating a substance. There was a great discussion on the power of intention.

He played a clip from The Secret Lives of Plants that astounded me. It appeared that positive or negative thoughts were having an influence on the plants.

His multi-directional speaker was a truly strange experience. It seems to project this sound to wherever it was pointing. It was extremely unsettling having the sound seemingly travel through me as he brushed it past the front row. Chilling stuff.

Initial thoughts:

I was initially quite taken aback by the quality of the set-up and I didn’t know many of the speakers but I had a feeling this was a pretty big deal.

Josh

Having never heard of flash on the beach, when I was invited by my Technical Director my reply was “What?” Then somehow the flow of conversation led him to contemplate whether I was engaged in narcotics …

Viet

Day 1: Dr. Woohoo – Cybernetic Arts

We saw Dr.WooHoo (possibly so called due to his love of ‘rock-a-billy’ judging by his quiff). He gave a cool speech on Cybernetics, showing us various videos from past cybernetics (which were surprisingly modern looking). I think that’s a concept that will be going very far indeed, for example, cinema could be filmed in a far more realistic 3D way.

Dr. Woohoo’s session really stood out, not because of his dangerously insane idea but his execution to create his brilliant interactive art designs. For his presentation he used the Zcam (infra-red motion detection camera for Xbox 360 Project Natal) to track movement of his face to create a drawing using Maya.

We then saw Hillman Curtis present a session on his work which wasn’t really related to Flash in any way but I thoroughly enjoyed it. He spoke about how his recent endeavours were mainly film based, doing portraits of different artists. One which he showed in the most detail was of Stefan Sagmiester (designer/typographer). It was called ‘some things that I have learned in my life’ (don’t quote me) and focused on him while at his new show in New York. It also had a few well-known designers etc telling the camera what they had learned as they wrote it on a foggy window for the cold, snowy outside to see. Milton Glaser had a nice story about how a taxi driver had told him “worrying gets you nowhere” (Buddha), which I liked.

Joel Gethin Lewis – Epiphany

The final speaker of the day, Joel Gethin Lewis, stole the show with his working life biography. The most impressive of which were huge interactive light installations – On tour with Massive Attack: he designed a huge concave wave shape which surrounded the band and reacted with the noise produced either by them or the audience. The Regent Street Christmas lights (fully interactive and even initialised by the public and not a “celebrity” for the first time),  finally he has created a 2.5 million interactive floor light install in Japan and all before the end of his 20’s. Nice CV Joel!

My personal favourite of this session was his work with the band Massive Attack. The interactive sound stage lights were used to create a great atmosphere for the gig.

Day 3: Mario Klingeman – Connecting the Dots

For a man who claimed he was merely a maths groupie (“I can’t play zee instrooments but like watching zee band” [heavy German accent]), DAMN did this guy know his maths! I really thought he was going to solve the hunt for the prime number formula.  He showed us how he made an image of the Mona Lisa fit into a Twitter Tweet (which I must say did pass me by slightly but it got about 200,000 views so I’m guessing its quite a breakthrough in the Twitter world)! It was pretty intense stuff, kinda like a mad scientist trying to tell you his life’s work in a matter of minutes, too eager and excited to make any sense, but you know there’s something pretty special there.

Seb Lee-Delisle – Work/Play

Our next meeting was with Seb Lee-Delisle of Flash Brighton etc (they have a few sites on the FWA award site including ‘Big and Small’). He was a great speaker and held a very captivating and interactive talk which was largely to do with a part of Flash which he hates and no longer seems to use called ‘Tween’ and instead urged everyone to use ‘Ease’ (looked as if he had a point). He then went on to hand everyone out a glow stick and some 3D glasses and we played 3D Pong by waving our arms frantically in unison to control our block.

JAM SESSION

We went to the ‘Jam Session,’ where six guys get up and at very short notice have to talk about a subject for 10 minutes.  We saw a few really great talks  there, one of which I found particularly amazing. Joa did a speed coding session which was just him DJing in code! Amazing, I’m sure he could do some sets in clubs with that concept and people would be  blown away.

Joa Ebert, speed coding, Live, 9 minutes, 40 seconds, absolutely crazy.

I instantly got why this was so popular at the conference last year. Each speaker was told to present something interesting in extremely short notice. Although they all presented some great things, two names stood out, Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert. Andre’s Kling Klang audio DSP lets you manipulate a sound that was placed on a circle like a clock a hand the pointer played the sound.

James Jarvis – Live Drawing with James Jarvis

Next was James Jarvis, an illustrator come toy designer with a skating background, who did a well-known ad for Nike. He was a very quiet man who spoke his story and then went on to do the rest of the talk whilst drawing and explaining his style under a camera. I went up to the stage afterward and managed to have a chat with him about skate culture, which we concluded has an extremely underrated influence on the creative industry and he gave me one of his doodles. Thanks James.

Joshua Davis – Space

So… the last session… Joshua Davis. Man, this guy is just on another level. A colourful punch of real life in a place full of square-eyed nerds (forgive me, square-eyed nerds). His approach to graphic design was just awesome. He showed us how he constructs his work and uses programs and a kaleidoscope technique to make these great images with ease. I really can’t explain fully how awesome and inspiring this guy was for me but if you ever get the chance to see him take a lecture (which he isn’t for a few years as he apparently has some things to do), for the love of god get right on it. Ok, so I liked his style but seriously check him out, top dolla…

He was perfect person to close the conference, fantastic speaker. He walked through his process to how he ended up with his final pieces. He showed interest in Bézier curve mathematics,  from which he created a relatively simple program that created curves. From constantly playing around and perfecting he ended up with his art. Using a program it can create countless different artwork – not bad considering this came from a dot just going across a screen. He applied the same concept of getting something interesting and making it great with a kaleidoscope effect which also created an iPhone app “Reflect” that created random pictures using any image.

Final thoughts of FOTB 2009

There was a little bit at the end where John the compare came on again and did a raffle type give away and introduced all the ‘people without which none of this could have happened’. I actually came away from the place with a slight ‘festival feeling’, the one you get when you are in a place with lots of people doing the same thing, working together. Very nice, well done John (organiser). May I just take the time to say I have never… NEVER seen so many apple products in one place in my entire life. The place was like the apple store on a busy Saturday afternoon, iPhones/Macbooks the lot, barely a PC or Nokia (etc) in sight.

As conferences go this was awe-inspiring and really exceptional, and the line up of speakers did were all fascinating and were a credit to each of their respective fields of profession. Even though I have not previous frame of reference everybody thought this year’s conference was quite remarkable.

Until next time FOTB ’09…

Viet Anh / Josh Denton

Just because you read the words, “vector, 2D, 3D, madness” and “fun,” do not assume that this relates to anything creative. Trapped in the middle of a row for an hour of Koen De Weggheleire and what became clear was maths, code and more stuff looking like coded maths, was a little too much for a morning session.

Do not assume that ‘connecting the dots’ relates in any way to the age-old art of dot-to-dot drawing. Mario Klingemann delves into the complex patterns that infinite prime numbers can form when twisted and turned, pretty mind blowing, followed by an attempt at compressing and representing the Mona Lisa into Unicode Chinese symbols, all within 140 characters.

James Jarvis’ live drawing was a welcome distraction from the flash, indulging us with tales of a past life as a semi-pro runner, desires to be a sporting hero, love of Tin-Tin and how he develops the worlds his potato headed characters inhabit.

Josh Davis followed, showing off a few examples of his generative artworks and how they loosely related to the concept of space. Some great work, 2 cans of red bull and a plug for his iPhone app, at £1.79 – the sliding finger action of an iPhone unlocking was seen all around – He’s now taking 2 years off for some rest.

In the next couple of days the blog will host a Flash on the Beach (FOTB) homepage take over, designers, techies, and interns descended on Brighton to see what Adobe and the FOTB folk were developing and inventing.

First up are Dan’s notes, from the underground! From the belly of beast! From memory whilst staring into space from his desk the next day …

Josh, the creative Intern, and Viet, the technical Intern, made the journey to the seafront twice.  We even gave them a couple of quid to buy crisps and cola. Well it is the least we could do for the trials that they suffer during their tenure @ skive.

The Actionscript team geeked out and were left inspired and informed by a number of standout sessions. Not only did they exercise their minds, but also their hearts – bonding on the pier with a breakfast pizza following a night of shots until 5 AM. I am telling you, these boys know how to party – it’s like after school at the chess club.

Image courtesy of @laszlo-photo – http://www.flickr.com/photos/laszlo-photo/2533701878/sizes/l/

A few of us here at Skive have banded together to create an Augmented Reality submission for this year’s e4 E Sting competition. For those of you not in the know, E Stings are the short clips that feature between the programs and adverts.

Anyway. Here’s what we came up with:

It was Lee Daley who suggested we make an AR entry. He also did the 3D work. Since then my fiance Juliet Lall has graced the project with some illustrations and Rakesh Mistry has taken control of the video production. I did all the Flash development and took the role of project leader.

15 E Stings will make it on-air and there have been over 750 entries. Let’s hope the lure of a free AR application will improve my chances!

Does this man look like a young Meat Loaf?

In the latest edition of .NET magazine Raoul and I outline the planning, architectural and technical considerations when developing a Flash site for progressive enhancement and search. Unlike most of my bloviate ramblings, our Flash & SEO article is a concise one page. I was happy seeing the article in print but this emotion was tainted as our Creative Director, Louis, cruelly remarked that I resemble a young meat loaf in my profile picture …