I have been thinking in doimg this upgrade for a while, but I was afraid I will break something in the blog.

Finally, today I thought: what the hell, let’s give it a try.

Actually, it was pretty easy and it seems to be working fine. Now I have to get used to the new admin interface, but it looks intuitive. I specially liked the capability to update the plug ins directly. What a time saver.

I also took the opportunity to include some additional plug ins, including the “about me” and “UsersOnline ” widgets (on the right sidebar).

I would like to find a plug in to add some sponsor ads - Flash boxes or something. I have not much traffic yet, but I can include a sponsor ad for Baloka.com to support my wife business. Hey, I guess I am promoting her site in many places in here. Well, I guess that’s fine.

Gilbert

A few days ago I started working on some interactive charts with Flex 3 Builder Pro, and I have been making some nice progress. In the past I did some stuff with Flex 2, but the documentation and examples weren’t that great.

Now in Flex 3, the dynamic help has more and better examples and the livedocs are quite good. The charting API, however has so many possibilities that the examples and explanations are not enough. Hence, there is a lot of work required to customize the charts the way I need them.

In a few days i will start posting some examples, so others can learn from what I have been doing and hopefully I will learn more as well for the comments and feedback for my readers (Are you outthere?)

Today I went to monthly meeting of the BFPUG (Boston Flash Platform User Group) to see a presentation about Gamebrix. Naveena Swamy, the founder of the company, showcased their platform, and it was a real threat.

I believe Gamebrix is up to something big. With their platform you can create games in 2 ways: One, by using the Gamebrix express, in which you can customize preexisting games or game templates by changing assets (graphics, audio, animations). The otherone by using the Gamebrix Builder. With the later you select your assets (graphics, animations, audio), either provided by the system or by importing your own. Then, you can add intelligence to your objects (again images or animations). By intelligence I mean interactivity - user actions (mouse clicks on the object), behaviors (how the objects react to events- i.e. to collisions), constraints and more. Finally you create the game, which is compiled on the server and produce a swf file (Flash file) that can be placed in any website or social networking site.

The platform has been built with Adobe Flex and its very easy to use. Once a user finishes creating a game, she can share it through the Gamebrix platform or post it in her own website. The game creator can easily edit games, change graphics, sounds and logic and quickly produce completely different games based on the same main storyline.

One cool idea is to use the platform to create contexts. A company can define certain rules, like use those graphics ( a logo, and some other branding elements) and use these themes to create games for that company in exchange for prizes and recognition. If you want to explore the potential of this for your own organization you may need to contact the company.

Right now the platform is in public beta testing and the access to create and share games is totally free of charge. We discussed a little about their business model, but not enough to be able to mention anything in here.

Well, what are you waiting for. Go there and create some cool games and share them with the world!!

I had the intension to play with an Actionscript 3D engine since I first learned about Sandy and then about PaperVision 3D and Away3D, but always started and quited, because I had to spend a lot of time getting familiar with those engines.

Last month Lee Brimelow - theFlashBlog, posted a nice tutorial of how to create a rotating cube. I took the opportunity to play with the code (in Flash CS3) and then tried to ported to Flex. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to include the images as MovieMaterials in Flex, so my experiments didn’t work.

Tonight I decided to google a little to see if I could find a solution, and voila, I found it in the Labs|Vizar blog. (they include the source code there, in case you want to play with it as well)

Anyway, below I am posting my first experiment, using images of baloka.com. - Hey is only fair to promote my wife’s site, isn’t it? :)-

In the following days I will make some experiments to do other nice stuff with PV3D. Among the the things to try are including videos and/or animations in the sides of the cube instead of images, and event behaviors and more.

Igor has posted a nice initial comparison of these applications that allow creating web-enabled desktop applications using Flash and Flex.

I have been using Zinc since it was known as Flash Studio Pro and I been able to develop some interesting applications. I thing the new version of Zinc opens new possibilities, but I like also the great potential that AIR provides.

In the Flex 3/AIR preview tour last week, Adobe showcased many cool capabilities both for Flex 3 and for AIR. Clearly, it’s an exciting time for RIA developers.

Last week I attended the monthly presentation at the Boston Flash Platform User Group (BFPUG) about physical computing using Flash CS3/Flex. Michelle Yaiser did a great job showing how to interface with several different pieces of hardware through Flash.

Basically, using a board from Making Things that can be connected to a PC via an USB port, a Flash application can exchange data with external sensors. This means the Flash app. can receive inputs from photocells, temperature sensors, potentiometers, bend sensors, etc, and send orders to servo motors and other devices. Pretty cool stuff.

In the past I have seen many demos related to physical computing with Flash, but I did not understand what was involved. Michelle explained the process explicitly.

After the meeting I started to explore the Making Things site to see what kind of things people are doing in this area. In their Projects page they list many exciting examples. One of the most attractive projects to me is the CandyFab 4000, - large - low cost - low resolution - 3D printer that uses sugar as the printing material.

They list many other innovative projects that could provide great ideas on how to use the computer to interact with the physical world. They have software interfaces for other programming languages besides Actionscript, but those are outside of my area of interest.

It seems I have to save some green to start playing around with these controllers and sensors. Probably my 11-year old Daniel would enjoy the journey even more than I.

When I tell people I develop e-learning applications, web-based visualization tools and enabling web-based collaboration using Flash and Flex (mainly flex) , most of them, including my own colleagues, think that all I do is to produce fancy PowerPoint-like presentations.

I try to explain to people that Flex is a software development tool, but since it compiles swf files they think is an animation tool. Hence, I was happy to see the article that Ted Patrick - Adobe Flex Evangelist published in his blog. In it Ted distills what Flex is and what is its value. Fro now on I will point people to that post when they need clarification.

Ryan Stuart, an Adobe Evangelist, has came up with his 10 RIA predictions for the year. Besides been an interesting read, I think he has some good points in there. RIA capabilities are improving rapidly because of the strong competition between Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe is very well positioned with the Flash platform and all the products in its portfolio, but Microsoft is a giant with a lot of followers in the development community.

At the end, the competition is good for the development community and for the end users. For the development community because we will have more tools - a better arsenal to produce great solutions, both for the web and for the desktop. For the end-users because, hopefully, there will be better and more efficient and effective web-based applications with improved UI design and navigation.

I believe in 2008 there will be a boom in visualization-collaboration applications. Ryan touches on those tow points in his predictions. I should add, that the integration “collaborative visualization” will be exploding as well. Currently there a few interesting web-based visualization applications like IBM Many Eyes created in Java and Gapminder, a Google product (acquired) made with Open Source Flash tools, and a few others. However, there collaborative capabilities are very basic, and they display visualizations from static data sources only.

Ryan did not mention any predictions about RIAs in mobile devices. I don’t know much about mobile devices, cell phones and PDAs, but I think there computational power, memory and storage capacity are reaching a point were they will be as powerful as basic computers and will be able to run Flash Player 9 and maybe Silverlight. Currently, only a handful of them support Flash Player 9, but I think this will change in 2008.

One thing is for sure, we have an exciting year a head of us…

A couple of years ago, I attended a presentation/demostration by Mok Oh, from Mok3 Inc., about their 3D modeler solution from photographs. It was amazing. At that time there were some other applications that  allow creating 3d models from pictures, like  PhotoModeler. However, the work flow and the power of the Mok3 technologies were unbeatable.

Last year Microsoft made a lot of noise with a different approach to create 3D models from pictures: Photosynth.
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

There is also an interesting video about Photosynth at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

However, I just came across a new technology, VideoTrace, which allows creating 3D models from video. VideoTrace is been developed by The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide, and The Oxford Brookes Computer Vision Group,

According to their website, http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/, “VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modeled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.”

On the site they have a video showing how it works, and it’s just AMAZING.

Enjoy!

A few days ago a saw a couple of the videos of Johnny Lee, a bright PhD student at CMU.

He has figured out of different and amazing ways to use the Wiimote. The first one is a method to tracking your fingers with the Wiimote. I like it, but found the whole thing is not very useful. Very ingenious anyway.

The next one, a $40 multi-point touchscreen is simply great.

I imagine some hardware manufacturer, even Nintendo, getting ideas from Johnny, like this previous one and planning the development of a higher resolution Wiimote.

In the last one, oh you gonna love this one, is really exiting. A head tracking for VR displays. I mean a way to see 3D stuff without any special lenses. You need “glasses, but … Just check it out, will you.

hum… I wander if using Papervision 3D, Sandy or Away3D with Wiiflash would make it possible to create some cool stuff with Flex or Flash. Lots of things to learn and experiment with.

You can follow along the comments on this experiment at Johnny’s blog.

In case you want even more, you can subscribe to his list to get notified when he releases new stuff at his CMU web page. Soon he will revealing something about 3D tracking.