Flashforward day 3

Day 3 started off a little later for me than the others thanks to the 2 parties thrown last night. One was the Flash's 10th anniversary party and the other was the one thrown by Wallop, a spin off of Microsoft creating a social networking application.

The first session I managed to get to was Sound Visualization Using Flash by Jared Ficklin. He started by talking a little bit the physics behind sound (frequency and amplitude) and how they work. Then he showed a video of the the coolest experiment I have even seen. He drilled a bunch of a holes into a tube. Then on one end of the tube, he pumped in propane and on the other end he put a speaker. When he lit the tub, it look like a hundred little candle flames across the top of the tube, but once he started pumping in different frequencies and music, the flames acted like sound sound spectrum where the flames changed in height and made a wave depending on what frequencies were coming through. After the round of applause for the video died down, he went on to show how we used to collect sound data before ActionScript 3 using third party applications to create text files. He finished up showing how much easier it is now to work with sound data in Flash with ActionScript 3 at runtime. One cool thing to note about this talk is that the entire time he was talking, he had different characters behind him on a screen mouthing everything he was saying using the Microphone object in Flash.

Next up was suppose to be Erik Natzke, but he was held up an airport because of the weather, so Brendan Dawes did an encore presentation of Analog In / Digital Out based on his new book, (which I managed to grab a copy of, so look for a review on it soon). This talk was a very inspirational talk about how he looks at the world and how things you would never thing of as interface can be used to create very engaging content. The first example of this is the play doh project he worked on where he first created a virtual piano that used the camera to monitor where the play doh was and play the appropriate key for that coordinate. He went to show a video application that plays at different speeds based on how much play doh is being viewed by the camera. Another cool example of using something for a purpose it was not intended for was creating art using ftp. He simply set the upload type to ASCII instead of binary, and it made random things happen to the images when they uploaded. Brendan also mentioned processing, a very cool Java based programming language for visual art. And the last thing he showed was a product called Ms Pinky. It's a vinyl record with time stamps on it that can be used in conjunction with software to control a variety of things. The example he showed was a video mixer where a DJ got on stage and mixed random videos just like he would if it were music scratching.

After that, it was time to get ready for the Flash Film Festival, always one of the highlights of the conference.

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