I’ve recently had some interesting dicussions with my friend John about the possibilities of Augmented reality + video projectors for live events. In addition to my recent research with SwisTrack and Blender3D I’ve jumped on the bandwagon with every other flash developer and tinkered with the FLART toolkit. I havn’t gotten much further than a working compile of the source with a few custom triggered events on my own patterns, but when I get around to cracking open Blender and get a few of my own models and textures exported to .as my I can probably motivate myself to do some more experiments with it.
actionscript, Augmented Reality, computer vision, FLART
To demonstrate my flash skills as well as showcase my other work, I’ve made jaketastic.com into a little operating system-ish application.
jaketastic.com user interface
On the left is the file browser. It can be used to explore all the files and subfolders in the jaketastic.com/browse/ directory. When you click an item in the file browser, it will begin loading in it’s own little feature rich window. You can move this window around, resize, minimize and close it. Tabs appear along the bottom for minimized items.
Because the file browser uses a php service to build the directory listings, content management is a snap. If I want to add an image, flash movie, .flv video, or html to the portfolio, I merely upload it to the browse directory and it instantly appears in the file browser. Furthermore, if I want to add a description to a file, I need only upload a .txt file with the same name to the same directory, and that .txt file will load in the window as well.
Jaketastic.com also allows you to chat with anyone else on the site in real time with the handy chat widget that I’ve made. Just type in a message and press enter and the message appears for everyone to see!
Jaketastic.com uses Amfphp 2.0 and a modified version Strike Remoting for server communications. For video playback, I’ve added a slider and fixed some bugs in FLVPlayerLite.
AS3, Flash remoting, User Interface
Bitwise Operations
For those of us without computer science degrees, a lot of the lower level guts of programming often remain a benign mystery until we encounter them in some code we need to borrow. In the Glaze physics engine, layers delegate which collisions will happen between the bodies in the physics simulation. The layer object is a unsigned integer expressed as hexadecemal: “0xffff” The function used to determine if Rigidbodies collide is a bitwise AND.
One needs to grasp hexadeciaml to binary conversion and bitwise operations to control all 32 layers of collisions. I immediately wrote a function to obfuscate these ugly bitwise things and assign a rigid body’s layer without suffering the unintuitive process of converting and comparing. I do appreciate that bitwise comparison is very appropriate for the collision layers, but it is very satisfying for me to spackle over it and never have to deal with it directly again.
Starting down the programming path by way of a flash designer, I have a rather mollycoddled perspective when it comes to coding. I am not very interested in making a compiler, or noodleing with memory management or lower level tinkering… not yet anyway.
AS3, bitwise, glaze physics