Jun 25, 2009 1
Font embedding in flash can be a total drag, so we’ve been working on an OS X application to do all the heavy lifting in creating font swfs. And we just said a ton about it already on the FontSWFCreator page and we’re tired of [witty remark] so just check out the full details here.
Jun 23, 2009 6
Wow. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over three months since we last pulled ourselves out of our actionscript induced stupor and posted to this blog. It’s been one heck of an augmented reality hangover.
But besides bringing sexy back, a lot of cool stuff has happened in squidder land:
For one, we’re coming out of the closet. That’s right: we’re all proud creative developers at the Washington, DC office of AKQA. We’re going to start talking a little more openly about our daily office work, so hopefully that means more interesting topics for you to read and more funny pictures for us to make.
And while we certainly don’t speak for the whole company when we post here (there are many other, far more talented developers who work in our offices all over the world who probably don’t want their good names tarnished by pictures of unicorns and Star Trek: TNG references), we do feel confident in saying that we’re the best looking flash devs this side of tellTarget.
For two, we launched a most excellent AR campaign for USPS, call the Virtual Box Simulator. It’s been getting some very nice attention and we’re proud to have found something useful to do with all of our experiments here.
Three: We got picked up both by Adobe in Japan and and PAGE in Germany. We sure fooled them.
Four: This guy played our drums with his face. This is why we get up in the morning.
Anyway, we’ve learned some good lessons in the past three months, but we have to clean out the 4,525 spam comments that we received since we last logged into WordPress. After that, we’ll be in the sharing mood, so watch this space.
Mar 9, 2009 6
Log this one in the “Totally out there” bin. Also in the “doesn’t really work, but shows off a cool notion that could probably be done if we were smarter and weren’t using an underpowered web plugin” bin. And the “Big Brother / 1984″ bin.
Inspired by the love our Augmented Reality Twitter Shirt recieved and our recent foray into face detection, we decided to put the two together. At the moment, the script doesn’t detect a specific person — that’s where the (kind of) comes into play. But imagine associating specific faces with twitter (or “face”book… …. sorry) usernames and you’ve suddenly combined the power social networking with video monitoring that would make the Brit’s CCTV system cry like it just got relegated to League Two.
Mar 9, 2009 3
If you’ve been messing around with Augmented Reality (or any webcam stuff in flash for that matter), you may have come to the realization that many mac users may not have their proper webcams (i.e. iSights) set by default. In a commercial setting, you want to avoid a person having to select their webcam at almost all costs — it’s another barrier to entry, and can be confusing, too. Especially if you have video editing software installed, there can be a lot of options, as you can see below.
However, it’s easy to check and see if the person has an iSight installed and, if so, automatically choose that one.
var index : int = 0;
for ( var i : int = 0 ; i < Camera.names.length ; i++ ) {
if ( Camera.names[ i ] == "USB Video Class Video" ) {
index = i;
}
}
//Oddly, Camera.getCamera needs a string of the camera index, NOT the name of the camera.
_webcam = Camera.getCamera( String( index ) );
Voilà. You’re now covered for mac users and windows users won’t notice a thing.
Mar 6, 2009 35
UPDATE: We’re be remiss not to also point you to Eric’s excellent FLARManager class. He took some of the stuff we’ve covered here and put a far more delicious topping on it.
One of the big things we’ve been wrasslin’ with recently here at Squidder is how to handle multiple instances of multiple markers using FLARToolKit. Well we haven’t totally nailed it — close, but there are still a few niggling issues. So we’re looking to you, dear Squiddite, to help us out.
Before reading on, you can get our source code here.
It contains all the libraries (FLARToolKit, Papervision, even some of our own) you need to get going, even if this your first FLAR project. It’s as simple as extending a single class, creating an array of the markers you want to load in, and rocking and rolling. It also works great even if you’re only dealing with a single symbol.
Read on for more thrilling details!
Mar 5, 2009 11
Before we start this post, we ask that all non-nerds leave the room. Seriously, it’s for your own good.
Alright, now that we’re alone, let’s get down to business. When we first started messing with FLARToolkit, we were confused as hell about how to create our own markers, as were many other people we came across in our augmented reality induced travels. So now that we’ve got a grasp on it, let’s break it down so that future Magellans of the internet won’t make that stop in the Philippines.
Mar 3, 2009 17
This actually came about as a happy little accident while trying to bend FLARToolkit to our will (tracking multiple instances of multiple symbols – a total pain in the ass. But that’s a story for another time). It just so happened that we were rocking out to Kiss’ “God Gave Rock & Roll To You” and it suddenly occurred to us that “Hey, it wouldn’t be so hard to make these things make sounds when they disappear.” So we did. And it was awesome.
We’ve (for once) posted a usable demo, so you too can rock out at your desk. Below is a quick video demo of all four sounds and after the break, you can see the demo of using multiple instances of the same drum.
Feb 26, 2009 20
A couple of days ago we came across the AS3 library Marilena which is based off the Object Detection from the C library OpenCV. It’s an object detection library which is able to process an image and search for a particular type of object with a set of features. In this case it’s looking for faces (was provided with the library). See more about how it works here.
The input images are driven from the webcam. We added confidence and motion monitoring for the purpose of “snapping” a photo.
Check out the video below or try out the demo.
Update 3.3.09: We’ve gotten a few requests for code examples using this technology and who are we to say no? Grab the source here.
Feb 25, 2009 2
We couldn’t help it. The XBOX Controller wasn’t enough. Had to hook it up to a wiimote too (big nod to the guys over at the WiiFlash project).
Feb 24, 2009 11
It’s no secret that we’re obsessed with augmented reality. Using this fantastic car demo whipped up by John Lindquist over at pv3d.org, we added in some FLARToolkit love to create a cool experience of driving the car around on a table.
But we didn’t stop there. Using the mind blowing-ly good ControllerMate and some simple keyboard mapping classes, we hooked the car up to a wired xbox 360 controller for maximum nerd. Next step, get some shaders going on that sweet Ford Focus. Ah, we couldn’t resist, so we added a shader.
UPDATE: YouTube was being unhappy with our videos for some reason (we suspect it doesn’t get along with Snapz, but who knows), so we’re moving over to Vimeo. We’ve also updated our demo video here, too, to include a slight shadow under the car, as well as part where the car does it’s business without the flar symbol present. Enjoy!