JG Ballard in Augmented Reality

by Devon O.· April 21, 2009· in Actionscript, Flash, Liberty· 1 comments
Well, I figured it was high time to jump on board the augmented reality train. All the examples I’ve seen have just been amazing and I had to find out for myself just how difficult it was. Turns out, it’s remarkably simple. For the subject matter, I turned to the recently deceased J. G. Ballard. Ballard was one of those remarkable authors that helped shape the course of my life. From the time I first picked up Atrocity Exhibition back in high school, I knew this man was a visionary comparable only, perhaps, to W. S. Burroughs. It’s a real blow to the entire world to have lost him. And, really,  what better figure to place in a “scifi is today” setting? You’ll be missed, Jim. RIP. If you’re familiar with AR in Flash, you know the drill. Print out the little marker file and hold it up to your webcam. You can rotate the image of Ballard using your arrow keys. The little animated ribbon things are courtesy Soulwire. Enjoy.
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FIS Athlone && Warbler Update

by Devon O.· April 05, 2009· in AIR, Flash, Life· 0 comments
Well, my wife’s first installation gallery exhibit came to an official close today. She had a great, albeit stressful, time and the response from the general gallery going public were fantastic. I can now officially say that I’m married to an artist. Can’t wait for the next exhibit.     In other news, just updated my Warbler AIR application to an official 1.0 status. In case you don’t know, Warbler is a little desktop app. that lets you post songs from your last.fm account to twitter with the click of a button. For more information and to download, head on over to the shiny new webpage made just for it.
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Last.FM + Twitter = Warbler

by Devon O.· March 08, 2009· in AIR, Flash, Life· 32 comments
Well, since all my friends did it, I finally jumped off the bridge and started using Twitter. Still not entirely sure what the real point is. Seems it has some good intentions – 0-day news, updates, notifications, etc. But mainly it seems a way of finding out when complete strangers are stuck in traffic, taking a piss, or going to bed. That said, if you’d like to find out when I’m stuck in traffic, taking a piss, or going to bed, you can follow me on Twitter here. Of course every time I try some new web app, I have to play around with the api. Inspired by a talk by Matthew Ogle of Last.FM at the Dublin Future of Web Applications conference (which I won a free ticket to, incidentally – Woohoo!), I decided to tie in Last.FM to Twitter and so Warbler was born (get it? music, tweeting, songbird, warbler… whatever). Warbler is an AIR application that will display the last 10 recent tracks posted to your Last.FM account and let you “tweet” them with the click of button, thereby sharing your wonderful taste in music with the whole (Twitter) world. Below are a couple screenshots to get a […]
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Motion Detection Navigation Idea (The Beginning)

by Devon O.· March 01, 2009· in Flash· 4 comments
So, my wife is working on an installation piece for a local gallery and got me digging into the concept of Flash web cam motion detection. I really liked the looks of the motion detection script posted over at the Soulwire blog and started tinkering with it. The early results are posted below. Of course it requires web cam access. After allowing it, slowly wave your hand left and right in front of the camera. The bad thing about web cam motion detection is it really varies wildly according to ambient settings (lighting, background commotion, etc). So if you’re getting bad results, you can use the sliders in the bottom left to try fine tuning the detector’s sensitivity (the top slider adjusts brightness, while the bottom adjusts the minimum area of detection).   Don’t know how useful it might be, but it’s fun to muck around with. And, of course, this nav experiment has nothing to do with the wife’s project, but that’ll come in due time…
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FITC Amsterdam – Day 2 in a Nutshell

by Devon O.· February 24, 2009· in Flash, Life· 1 comments tags: amsterdam, FITC
Started out the day with Andre Michelle’s “Boing-Bumm-Tschak (Flash 10 Sound API)” presentation. Very beautiful stuff. The biggest thing learned here is that manipulating sound is not so different from manipulating graphic items. That is, reverb is nothing more than a basic “easeout” formula and flanging is just elasticity applied to sound. Some useful tips he shared: use linked lists as much as possible, never create objects at runtime as it’s wildly costly – recycle them instead and, of course, use a good coding structure. He ended the presentation with a look at the hobnox audiotool which was just insane. I ended the presentation by introducing myself and letting him know that the little “Behind the Curtain Coding Award” that’s been displayed on his website’s front page for years is there largely due to me (well, me and Robert Reich – the old BTC coding mods). He seemed mildly bemused, but didn’t really know what to say. I just ducked out as a line was forming up behind me. Next up was Lee Brimelow’s “Flash Platform Polymath” presentation. Here Lee gave a good rundown of what disciplines a Flasher should be comfortable with to move ahead these days: visual design, audio/video/motion, […]
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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