Nick's Blog

Have been looking at this website lately, www.hbovoyeur.com
It is a really interesting take on multiform narrative. There are a number of stories going on at once that you can watch and see how the characters interact in an apartment building. The only annoying issue with it is that it uses a lot of bandwidth and so often will play for about 15 seconds and then start buffering again. Definitely worth checking out though.

I have been looking at some video tutorials about the new features in flash player 10 lately and it looks like there is some very cool stuff coming. If you look at the first few videos on the site http://www.gotoandlearn.com/ you will get an idea of how these new things are going to work. One that looks very impressive is the ability to move movie clips and images in 3D. In the video you see how simple it will be to setup movie clips in 3D space and be able to move through them with a virtual camera.
The beta of flash player 10 is already out so you can play around with it now however there has not been any update to flash yet so publishing the content is a little tricky at the moment. Hopefully there will be an update to flash soon as it looks like there is a lot of exciting stuff coming.

Just found this funny post on Engadget that shows even the big laptop companies use stock photos, it also shows that there photoshop skills aren't all that crash hot.

MSI Wind

Original stock image

I have been playing with a set of classes for flash this week called Flashr.

http://flashr.kelvinluck.com/

It allows you to connect to the photo sharing site Flickr and use the information in a flash project. I have been experimenting with bringing in a number of thumbnails based on a search term to create a montage of images that can then be rolled over to give a little bit of information about them.
It makes the process of collecting this data far simpler than it otherwise would be. I also found some handy tutorials that make the process even easier. One that is interesting is at the website:

http://petitpub.com/labs/media/flash/petikr/

It guides you through how to create a 4x4 grid of thumbnails that then link to the full size images on the Flickr site.
Its a really powerful addon for flash that I recommend you check out.

Today while I was browsing the internet I came across this cool site about the "Emergency Party Button". It's basically a big red button that when pushed turns this guys apartment into a party. Everything from strobe lights and lasers to smoke machines turn on and they are all synced to msuic as well (What is love by Haddaway). Here is a video of it in action and a link to the guys website where he explains how he built the system and what parts he used. Very cool.



http://www.plasma2002.com/epb/

I found this very interesting post on http://www.gotoandlearnforum.com which explains how to use a PHP script to generate an XML file based on a folder of images. Basically this means you can upload a new image into the folder and when flash goes to find the XML file listing the images it runs the PHP script. This script then looks through that folder and generates the XML that flash needs to see the image. It may sound a little complicated but it means you dont have to update the XML file yourself if you want to add a new image to your site. Instead you just have to upload it to the correct folder on your server. Very handy.

Finally got to see U2 in 3D last week and it was well worth the wait. Compared with what we saw at the Virtual Room this was at a whole new level. The sheer size of the screen combined with the 3D was incredible. It really felt like you were at the concert and at times like you were up there on stage. There were some amazing shots from in the audience where it looked like you could reach out and touch the people in front of you.
Personally I am not a huge fan of U2 but I still thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Definitely a must see.