Blogs

Thanks to Jesse at actionscript.org I am once again attending the WebDU web technology conference in Sydney. I was here in 2008 and was very excited about returning to see and hear from people in the industry about the latest products, techniques and projects currently happening in the field.

I arrived at Star City this morning a little bleary eyed but a quick cup of outrageously strong catering-style coffee gave me the kick in the pants I needed to enjoy the keynote presented by Mike Chambers from Adobe, the chief Evangelist for the Flash Platform. Mike focussed mainly on AIR and web-based Flash and showed us some examples of people doing interesting things with the Flash Platform. Notably, he demoed some Augmented Reality examples using PaperVision 3D and the AR Toolkit (I think). These were real candy-type applications, the kind of thing a company might use as interactive bait to attract people to their site - the GE SmartGrid and another one that lets you create and animate a 3D sasquatch, all online and creating rich experiences using the webcam.

Mike also demoed two projects from the New York Times - the first a photojournalism blog which was a really slick online experience. I wish newspapers in Australia gave this kind of first-class treatment to their photojournalism because it is a really engaging and intuitive way to digest news and events online.  The second a desktop application using AIR called the New York Times Reader, that was basically a digital version of the newspaper that utilised the new text rendering engine in Flash Player 10 to create a better reader experience for the paper than can be represented on the traditional webpage. To complement this, Andrew Spaulding from Adobe demoed an online/desktop app created (by one guy) with Adobe AIR. This was a music service (sponsored by Sony) that used a slick tie-in between the online service and the desktop app by allowing users to buy songs and videos online and have them available for playing on their desktop or in the browser.

These are great demos, however I reckon there is a bit of a problem with the proprietary players being used in the two AIR examples in that, if I get a digital subscription to the NY Times or buy songs and videos from the aforementioned online service, can I view that media on anything else other than the supplied applications? For the newspaper, not so bad because once news is read once, it is rarely revisited (although they do cache it all in the app, which is great). But in the case of the desktop media player, well, I generally consume my music and videos on my laptop using iTunes, and I’m pretty happy with it. Do I really want or need another media player on my computer? I will need to chase down Andrew and find out if those videos and mp3’s are available for use across any app I choose, because for me and suspect a few others, that’s a bit of a deal breaker.

Steven Heintz from Adobe was the third speaker for the keynote (I think this keynote should’ve been credited as being delivered by Adobe, because Mike Chambers was only a small part of the show!) and he gave us a demo and first preview of Flash Catalyst for Windows. It was a slick demo and the workflow for creating interactive experiences quickly from artwork (PS, AI) looked really attractive for lots of users. He showed us how to make an application using just Flash Catalyst with data entered directly into the IDE, and then he also took the same app and hooked up the components to web services using Flash Builder. This would be great for designer friends of mine who would like a better way of creating simple apps from their artwork with a better workflow than is currently available using the Flash IDE and artwork tools, but also allows nerds to get in there and hook up dynamic data if need be. Excellent.

Terry Ryan was the fourth speaker from Adobe, and he was talking about Cold Fusion but I have absolutely no right to comment on that! I know nothing about Cold Fusion, I’ve always been a PHP guy and I’m comfortable with that. Terry mentioned some new features for the upcoming new release of Cold Fusion and a new Eclipse-based IDE called Bolt (those Abode people loves the Eclipse don’t they...) which looked good. Someone behind was gasping like it was 1967 and she had just seen John Lennon every time he mentioned a new feature. I like John Lennon, he is my favorite Beatle. Maybe I should use Cold Fusion...

So that was it for this year’s Keynote. Not quite as spectacular as last year (where they were showing off new apps from the unreleased-at-that-time CS4 package) but still interesting and exciting enough to keep me happy and eager to try some of that stuff out! Alas though, no superhero intros...

 There were two sessions at FITC Toronto about cool Japanese Stuff, entitled “Cool Japanese Stuff: Side A” and “Cool Japanese Stuff: Side B.” There was cool stuff at both, but for now I’m going to focus on side B.

The first speaker was Tomohiko Koyama, who works at Katamari Inc. His full presentation, as well as links to all the awesome stuff he mentions, are available here. Tomohiko is responsible for FLARToolkit, a truly amazing implementation of augmented reality in AS3. I really can’t believe this works so well in quaint little Flash. (It definitely wouldn’t have worked in AS2.) What it does is attach simulated 3D objects to real-time images fed in via web-cam. The user holds a telltale post card or something he printed out with distinct visual characteristics, and the Flash movie will attach to that object and render 3D objects on top of it in real time. For some amazing implementations, see this or this.

Tomohiko explained that AR has been huge in Japan for the past few years, mainly on Nico Nico Douga, Japan’s answer to YouTube; unfortunately the previous incarnations of AR did not run in the browser, so Tomohiko set out to achieve browser-based AR. FLARToolkit is actually a port of a C++ framework called ARToolkit. ARToolkit was ported to Java, which in turn was ported to AS3 by Tomohiko and his friends at Katamari Inc. It can be used with a variety of popular Flash 3D engines, including Papervision, Away3D, and Sandy.

Tomohiko went into a quick code demo, showing how it’s extremely easy to code something up. He’s able to attach a cube in just two or three lines of code. Wow! I for one am definitely going to make some games out of this. You should too. You can download an English-language starter kit with everything you need at http://saqoosha.net/en/flartoolkit/start-up-guide/. FLARToolkit is available for free GPL license if your code is open source; otherwise there’s a (pricey) commercial license available from ARToolworks.

The other speaker was Yoshihiro Shindo, from BeInteractive. Yoshihiro is responsible for Spark Project, “Japan’s largest AS3 community.” Yoshihiro, 20 years old, was introduced as the youngest FITC speaker ever. He says that he would rather code ActionScript than eat.

Spark Project is an open-souce Flash community, public svn repositories and all, whose motto is, “Be happy by sharing source code and knowhow with everyone.” A nicer sentiment I did not encounter in all of FITC. Spark Project has over 200 open-source AS projects currently shared, which go all over the map in terms of functionality. FLARToolkit, for one, is on there. Yoshihiro also demoed Sazameki, a powerful-looking audio processing library that both generates and processes waveforms; Frocessing, an AS3 drawing library that behaves like Processing; and BetweenAS3, an impressive new tweening engine.

BetweenAS3 appears to be powerful, fast, and lightweight—the holy triad of tweening engines. BetweenAS3 offers tween processing (reverse, slice, faster/slower, parallel tweening), complete tween control (freely move beteeen “frames” of the tween), action integration (execute commands within a tween), great performance, and low memory usage. Yoshihiro demoed a particle tween simulation with tens of thousands of pixels tweening simultaneously, and BetweenAS3 blew the competition (Tweener, TweenMax, several others) out of the water, in terms of frame rate and memory. I salivated. Unfortunately, BetweenAS3 hasn’t quite released yet, but you are welcome to access the svn repository here. Check it out, branch it, check in fixes—all is encouraged! You gotta love that.

I attended an interesting talk today called “Dimension Wars: Bridging the Gap between 2D and 3D in Flash,” from a couple of guys from Firstborn in NYC, Eric Decker, Jens Fischer, and Dan Lacivita. The focus of this session was the different ways Firstborn has produced experiences that seem 3D—whether that means true 3D or fancy 2D depends on the project. The one point that these guys were extremely careful to make is that they never decide at the outset of a project whether they will be working in 3D or using any specific technology. Instead, they first work out the idea, then they figure out what technology best supports this idea. Makes sense.

The talk starts out with several demos of “fake” 3D:

• For starters, a swf in which a light source follows the mouse and casts shadows from spheres. It looks 3D, but the swf is literally just rotating and scaling simple movie clips that represent the shadows, based on a simple calculation of the relative mouse position.
• Next, a simple game in which you toss fish to a polar bear. The fish and the polar bear are indeed 3D objects, rendered as static sprites, and placed into a non-3D environment. The illusion of depth is created by simply making the Polar bear (in the background) small relative to the fish (starting in the foreground). When the fish is tossed, its y-position follows a sine curve, and its size scales down, giving the illusion of 3D motion.

Pretty damn simple, and a hell of a lot less work than Papervision. Keep this in mind as you think about your own 3D projects.

The Firstborn guys then talked about a couple of different real 3D frameworks available to Flash developers. They emphasized that Papervision is not always the best tool for the job, contrary to the beliefs of a wide swath of intimidated Flash developers; it really depends on what you want to do. An alternative is FIVe3D,  which stands for Flash Interactive Vector 3D.

This vector-based 3D framework is totally open-source and pretty easy to use. The entire system is vector-based, with 3D objects made up of vertices, linear vector connectors, and Bezier curves. These vector-based constructions will seem very familiar to Flash developers, only in 3D instead of 2D. In fact, much of the syntax mirrors regular AS3 syntax—for instance, there’s Sprite3D instead of Sprite, there’s a graphics3D property instead of graphics, and so forth. From my perspective, it looks like FIVe3D is a great option for generating lots of 3D visuals programatically; Papervision may be a better choice for certain kinds of project that rely on lots of 3D modeling.