My First Car

I found this picture today (thanks to Claire and Phil for sending it to me a while ago), its not actually my first car but its much less embarassing!
Thats me sat inside although you can't really see me, outside Hash View in Blackwell Warwickshire, former home of Phillip "burn" Matthews! The shadows are Burn and Craig Begley, we were a posse at the time.
Those were the days....

Pointless Painting Powered by Papervision3D

Being part of the Papervision3D community means I get sent links to new sites all the time and they're mostly very slick websites.
Well this one's different. There's absolutely no point to it at all except FUN!

Its by the guys at iq12 to celebrate their birthday. Check it out here.

Cool Digital Art

I found this nice little piece while looking through Chu Yue's portfolio site (yes its a real name, not an improper suggestion!) and thought it was really nice. Its made with Papervision3D.

Cool Augmented Reality Using Papervision and Flash

The guys over at BOFFSWANA have done something very cool using the FLARToolkit and Papervision3D. All you need is a webcam (and abit of AS3, Papervision and general Flash knowledge) and you can make little monsters appear to be walking around your desk! Go over and check it out on their site and leave them a comment if you think its cool. Which you do.



Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo

The Spiralizer

The Spiralizer is a different version of The Blade - almost the same but more reactive to the music.

The Blade

Yes its another visualizer but I think its got real retro power!

I call this one The Blade

Capital Punishment

Man, what a bummer.

So we went to London to wow the hordes of prospective students with our Interactive Table. We arrived in the Business and Design Centre in Islington at about 9am to set up armed with our blackout material for the roof of the stand.
Now, let me explain. The GMX in Manchester had a high roof with big red lights. After a couple of hours of confusion wondering why we were having problems with the table, we pointed the IR camera at te roof and realised that the big red lights were in fact beaming a big fat load of Infra Red light straight down - they must be heat lamps or something. So we went out and got some curtain blackout material for the roof of the stand and things were good.
Alas, the Business and Design Centre has a glass roof :(
Despite the fact it had been snowing in London the day before it was of course, a beautiful sunny day. Even with the stand covered the amount of light coming in was too much for our table and we were, as they say, scuppered.
We did get it working for the last half hour of the day when it was starting to get dark, but of course the thousands of students had pretty much all gone.
The free wine at the exhibitors reception was very nice though :)

I'm off to London now for another two day exhibition with the Interactive Table. Let's hope it all works ok!

It should be fun - I've arranged to meet up with my friend who works there as a fashion designer.

Cool Visualiser

I thought I should share this link to a cool visualiser with you since I've been doing a lot of these kind of things lately (but not in 3D). Its by Grant Skinner who is one of the Daddies when it comes to Flash and Actionscript.

Check it out- its pretty cool, and expect to see something similar here soon!

Which reminds me, I haven't shown you any papervision stuff....

Too much Candy?

Well I restarted Firefox and they all work again. I guess it must be a cache thing... too much candy and the fox gets sick!

Anyway here's another visualiser. This one looks like an eye so I've imaginatively called it Eye Candy!

More Candy!

I wrote a thousand words of my paper today so I though I'd reward myself by playing with Flash a bit more.
I came up with what I've called Candy Visualiser Its not interactive, you just admire its beauty!
Be warned! It is processor heavy so if you PC is old or slow it may crash! (sorry)

[Edit] I don't know whats going on with these Flash movies, sometimes they work and sometimes they dont....

I know all these generative art things have been done before but they are so much fun to do!

Smoking Wave Eye Candy: Revisited

As promised here is the Smoking Eye Candy demo that you can play with. You may need to download the Flash 10 plugin (firefox) or ActiveX (IE) but the page should have a link to make it nice and easy for you :)





I like it so much I used a screenshot for this blog title.

Let me know what you think.

[Update] There still seems to be an issue with Firefox, although it worked when I posted this :s
Safari seems OK though, and JackMedia says it works for him in FF and Safari. I would appreciate it if you could tell me about any issues - browser name/version etc.

London Calling

Me and Dave set up the Interactive table today just to make sure everything is working fine. It was of course but its better safe than sorry.
We're taking it to another UCAS fair at the business and design centre in Islington on sunday, monday and tuesday.
More stuff to pad out the prtfolio and CV!

Critical Mass

I am starting to write my critical paper today. Its basically a small dissertation, only 4-5000 words, so its not too bad. One thing that does bug me though is the hand in date. Its the day we get back from the christmas break, which means for three weeks our tutors wont be available, which essentially means it needs to be as good as done before Christmas.

So I better get on with it....

Dinner Party

Tonight I had my first real dinner party. There were no less than eight of us!
It went pretty well except I had to cook a lot more rice than I had anticipated.
It was time to pay back my good friends Matt and Janire and Chris for all the meals they've cooked me over the last few months. They bought with them armin of seltzdesign and Santi (not sure on the spelling) who has just moved over from spain. My housemates Dan and Jeremy were also indulging.

We had Thai Yellow curry with Monkfish and Jasmine rice. I also made a Thai Red vegetable side curry. Monkfish is very nice indeed which is probably why it costs so much

When word gets around all my friends will be asking when they are to be invited....
I think next time will be lasagne though!

Future Plans

I can't say too much but I have been working with some people this weekend on a business idea that I think has some real potential. I am pretty excited about it but I don't want to jinx it..... Watch this space!

Fun atThe Fair

We [Reaction Faction] recently took our mkiii interactive table to a UCAS event in Manchester. After some initial set up problems (the exhibition center has huge IR emmiting lights!) it went pretty well. It was nearly as popular as the lollipops!

We met up with my sister H who is in uni up there and we all went out. Dave suffered severely the next day hehe!

Smoking Wave Eye Candy

Continuing from my last post "Ultimate Kaoss?" this uses the computeSpectrum method of the SoundMixer class. For some reason it wont work in a browser. When I work out why I'll post a link here so you can have a play.

Ultimate Kaoss?

I downloaded the new Adobe Flash (CS4) on wednesday and got stuck in to some of the new features. For the first time its possible to dynamically generate sound from the Flash player, albeit only a simple sine wave. I put together this proof of concept for a Multitouch "Kaoss pad" type application that I hope to use on one of the interactive tables.

To play simply mouse over the rectangle.

I will be posting more about the Interactive Tables soon....

Hello!

Hello!

Unbelievably this is my first ever blog! I have been an interactive media student for over two years now and I've been learning some cool stuff and working with some cool people too.

I'll be posting lots of stuff from the last year and new stuff as I go along. Hope you like some of it!