Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

The Terminator: Fiction?

Posted by James - 07/06/08 at 08:06:52 pm

Surfing BBCi’s interactive tv services, I couldn’t help take notice of one ominous sounding news report - “Skynet military launch postponed” - yee gads!
Skynet ?!

It gets better with this quote;

Software on the launch vehicle did not behave normally during a test sequence.

Did not behave normally (!) Suddenly I feel less worried about America’s Cyber warfare division (due to become active on October 1st) and more worried about our own military systems. I’ve always thought that the best way to make people believe reality is fiction was to make a movie about it (nobody believes movies are real, right?) and here we are, tempting fate. Uh oh.

See the full BBCi report here.

Augmented Reality with Flash

Posted by James - 05/06/08 at 06:06:13 pm

Here’s another “wow” project - FLARToolKit (FLash Augmented Reality ToolKit)

Your webcam, little bit of Papervision, the FLARToolKit, and you’re off.

It’s similar technology to that which powers “Eye of Judgement”, and is pretty cool.  If you’ve got a webcam go and scribble a large black box onto a bit of paper and test it out.

Kudos to Make me pulse and Games Alfresco for finding the link in the first place!

Facebook security?!

Posted by James - 30/05/08 at 10:05:51 pm

Ah Facebook. As a rule of thumb you shouldn’t really add any more personal information than’s nessessary to a website - but people tend to just forget that, especially on social networking sites. And noone really reads the legal & privacy notices - because they’re about as flexible as the EULA on your videogames, just explain in very careful words just how much they are allowing themselves to abuse your trust.

Just how safe is your data on Facebook then? When you start out, there’s a lot of inital restriction using the website, having to have ‘friends’ or ‘groups’. The most any stranger can see is a small thumbnail, your name and perhaps a few groups or your country. Think that’s safe enough? Wait until you’ve listened to a bit of scaremongering about the third-party applications…

Continue reading Facebook security?!…

Immersive Media : 360° Flash Video

Posted by James - 27/05/08 at 03:05:30 pm

Immersive Media, who I gather are also responsible for a lot of the Google Streetview images, have taken the ‘interactive panorama’ idea a little further than most, and introduced ‘Immersive Video’. Sound interesting? Indeed it is.

Continue reading Immersive Media : 360° Flash Video…

Flash Player 10 (Astro) Prereleased!

Posted by James - 15/05/08 at 09:05:21 am

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Flash Player 10 is out on prerelease. Why not go and give it a whirl?

Edit: Serge Jespers says it better than I.

FIVe3D - A different approach to 3D Flash

Posted by James - 15/05/08 at 08:05:20 am

FIVe3D is unlike other 3D engines ( such as Papervision or Alternitva3D ) in it’s approach.  We’re not talking shape primatives here, we’re talking extending the basic flash elements ( Sprites, Text, MovieClips ) to include Z-properties.  Looking at the demos, it’s not what you’d expect from ‘Flash 3D’, because we’re expecting another Papervision clone.  But no, the approach that Mathieu has taken when developing this is much different - and actually makes much more sense for a lot of situations.

Plus, it’s fun.  I’m a sucker for fun demos.

Continue reading FIVe3D - A different approach to 3D Flash…

Inline Javascript and the defer attribute

Posted by James - 11/05/08 at 09:05:32 am

We use javascript to load our Flash elements into Webpages - it just makes life so much easier. There’s many ways you can go about it, but one is to use inline Javascript to handle function calls to your document.write(); or innerHTML(); functions. Naturally, these functions scrape through our HTML and do their business, targeting and replacing elements with the embed/object code for our Flash movies.

You might call us slackers, or you might base it on our faulty understanding of the defer attribute (and this site will confirm it), but we thought that adding the defer attribute to our inline code thus;

<script type="text/javascript" defer>

    addFlash('flashdiv');

</script>

Would mean that the inline script wouldn’t be executed until the whole page is loaded. So you could effectively add the code anywhere in the page - say, the header - and it didn’t matter. Well, what works in Internet Explorer doesn’t always work in Firefox (et al.).

Continue reading Inline Javascript and the defer attribute…