photo animation

This is one of my failed experiments

The idea: A app that adjusts the beat of music to the movements. Could be use in jogging and other fiscal exercise.

Many people like to listen to music during there workout. Mouse of the time there is a correlation between the energy of the music and the intensity of the workout. Sometimes when I am running I find my self syncing my steps to the beat of the music. I made a prototype using a sound manipulation library I found. The app allows the user to load all the mp3 files in a specific folder on the device and play them with the same BPM. I found out that beat detection is hard to do, best flash links I were good only for techno/house music (music with a clear base beat):

http://www.julapy.com/blog/2007/12/30/beat-detection-in-flash/
http://blog.andrevenancio.com/2010/01/06/beat-detection/
http://xobert.com/beatdetector/

I used this software to detect and write the BPM in the ID3 meta data of the MP3 files then I load them on my HTC Desire HD.
http://www.pistonsoft.com/bpm-detector.html

Resons why I gave up on the idea:
- I tried running with it and its annoying
- AS3 consumes a lot of CPU to do sound transformation
- Song don’t sound natural if tempo change is bigger then 10%
- Song average BPM is 120, I run at about 170 steps per minute

- On iOS devices, file and browse dialogs are not supported. This method cannot be used.

I still think this could be a successful application if developed in native code (for maximum speed) and if their are some added features like GPS speed detection and correlation with music, route etc.

Soucers

kinect

I got the new Kinect sensor. Decided to share some of my experiments. I am using prime sense driver along with openNI middle-ware. I build a C# wrapper to get the hand x,y,z coordinates to flash. The wrapper also has the possibility of moving mouse cursor and creating mouse clicks in two ways:
– move “presses” hand in the kinect direction.
– when hands is held still.

The socket server sends the XYX coordinates along with slide events.

To get this runnig you need to have a kinect sensor , windows the latest prime sense drivers, openNi middle ware, and .net.

Download the C# kinect Wrapper. Extract the files. Run the “CSharp_AS3.exe” in the release folder and click “start server”.

Download the flash files. Extract files. Run the “simpleKinect.exe”.

Wave to your kinect, and start flipping.

Other experiments using as3Kinect server:

Cub Map:

Virtual girl that looks at you:

photo animation

I decided to post one personal project that I did last year. The “AS3 Karaoke: Player is a experimental online mp3/cdg player. It`s been a pleasure developing it but unfortunately I have no time to finish it so whoever is interested in continuing please feel free to do so.

A little bit about the project. It started as a bet between me and a friend. We were planning a karaoke party and we were using the popular application Karafun to test our songs. I said that this can be done in flash/as3. He said that is not possible. And there I had a challenge.

Project evolution :
– Finding the cdg file specifications ( not a lot of references );
– Writing code for loading *.cdg files into bytes arrays. Parsing and displaying data into Bitmap.
- performance optimization for intensive bitmap manipulation.
- synchronizing mp3 playback with cdg parser;
- cdg “Zip” compression and decompression for faster download speed.
- implementing seek function;
- implementing playback speed control;
- implement pitch modifier;
- implement equalizer;
- add fancy visualizer ( that kills slow preprocessors );
- creating playlist with search, arrange, resize, next previous features;
- record voice and mp3
- encode recoding into wave, or mp3 (using alchemy encoder);

This project was done in my spare time as a proof of concept and is very far from a production level application.

DEMO after you select a song give it some time to load.

Source files

Mp3 and Cdg file download it and extract it in the folder with the source and add it to the playlist

photo animation

Using the extract method of the Sound Class we can now do a realistic lip Sync of sounds coming from external files or even from the microphone. This demo uses Google translate text to speech service. This allows me to send a string with the text and replies with a mp3 with the readout of the specific text. The playback pitch, temo, and speed of the mp3 file can be set thrum the controls.

If your interested in the source files give me a buzz. There is a limit o f 100 characters

RollMenu

A menu I did for a a presentation proposal, uses tween Lite and can be customized. Inspired by the “else mobile phone“. Circular/elliptical menus are nice and should be used more often.

Demo

Sources

2. Fonts the less fonts embeded the better ( embed only the neccesary fonts)
3. Compiler settings Uncheck “Strict Mode” and “Warning Mode” + 30% in compile speed,
SWF Settings uncheck “Compress Movie”, “Include hidden layers”, “ Include MXP metadata”, and
“Export SWC”, Publish only flash swf format.

4. Code – if your using libraries compile them into SWC files (huge decrese in compile time);
5. Brak up your project into smaller swf files.
6. Use Bit101 MinimalComponents components
insted of flash/flex components.

UPDATE: For big projects it is best to compile the fla into a swc whenever you do library changes and use flash develop with the flex compiler for code compilation

print screen of the a real estate company

These are some web-sites I done several years ago. Back in that time I was using as2.

Key features of this web site are technical plans of all the flats, ability to zoom, uses SWFObjects java script library to enable back and forward browser buttons, Google Earth localization of the area.
So here we have Libra Residance, a real estate company from my home town was building a chain of buildings. This web site helped them get funding for the project:
see website

A first attempt to create o dynamic location map (before google maps hit the stage) I did this in 2005 see website or download the fla

photo animation

For the past 2 weeks I am working on a touch screen project. This involves 8 full HD tv that are each covered by a touch screen. They will present different 1980*1080px animations presenting images/videos. The big question was ” Can Flash Player handle it?”

So I started googaling…. My colleagues started working on the first screen using C# and XNA. They done some smooth Iphone like HD animations. The test I made in flash were really bad. I almost gave up on flash… it did not even compare with XNA . But yesterday things turn around and after some performance optimizations I obtained it: “Flash silky smooth HD animation! ”

Key performance optimizations:
- cachAsBitmap turn to false for all display objects that change;
- Decrease the number of visible display object;
- BitmapData.smoothing = false;
- BitmapData.lock() for all images;
- No filters !!;
- 60 fps or so not to many FPS;
- A clean easing functions;
- Hardware acceleration = Level 1 Direct;

Example :

Source Files
P.S :
Flash Player Hardware acceleration not working for now…
exept for this website:
http://www.derbauer.de/NPK/index.html

toy sory pring screen

UPDATE !! flash player 10.1 NetStream has a new method appendBytes. Using this people can playback local FLV and MP4.

Inspired by “FriendsofED Object Oriented ActionScript” I created this lite weight (40.0 KB) to serve as a the default player for a e-learning project. It can play the following types of files : jpg, mp3, flv , mp4, ans swf.

Some features of the player are:
- full screen support;
- sound visualizer;
- progressive download and display of images (using URLLoader , ca pop security errors if loading images from other domains);
- light weight
- support loading local JPG and MP3 files;

The design pattern used is Model-View-Controller (technically speaking, not really a design pattern; rather, it’s a collec-
tion of various patterns that form an architectural framework). It has 2 main abstract classes (“MediaDisplay.as” and “MediaController.as”). These classes are extended to create the 3 different types of Display and Controller objects. The result benefit comes in the ability to use the same functions in the main class to control the different types of media.

The player can be extended to support other file types and youtube and other video services playback;
HyperPlayer Source Files

EarthPapervison

A 3d flash view of Earth…
I made this demo for the e-leaning project I am working on. Something about seeing our planet that makes the power of papervison limitless. A future version of this will include features like zoom in on specific area (like in Google Earth) and switching to different planets of our solar system. This all sow gave me the idea of a chat web app that show the position of the people connected…