Some of the flash stuff I’d posted was targeting Flash Player 10 even though they weren’t FP10 specific. In simple English this means they weren’t workin for people who only have Flash Player 9. This is mainly because I’m a Flex n00b and all my projects were setup for 10. I’ve revised the files and the affected posts [1, 2] should work for everyone now.

Working on sliced up video for the VideoVuMeter reminded me of some videos I had seen a while back that demonstrated time distorted videos. The most remarkable examples are from the Khronos Projector research group, who have done many studies into the concept. One of the simplest implementations of this idea is to give a temporal delay to the slices of video, which results in fun time twisting distortion effects. And though I’d seen After Effects pre-rendered videos of this effect, I hadn’t come across a realtime Flash version. So here’s my first crack at it. I recommend waving your arms around :)

Since I’ve never tried monkeying with computeSpectrum to analyze audio data, I figured that would be a fun place to start before launching into the Flash Player 10 dynamic audio APIs. I applied the ‘vumeter’ effect to a song’s music video, slicing the frames into vertical strips and shifting them based on the amplitude of the frequency. The shifting amount is variable based on mouse Y position. This looked nice when applied to videos with a main focal image and a plain background, on my wife’s suggestion I wound up using the song Colors by Utada Hikaru, Japan’s favorite Tetris playing pop star.

Video card glitch series. I’m liking the gradiated spikes and the stretched textures. Incidentally, this hardware glitch happened for a short while when running Maya. It would mess up any active redraw region. Quite funky.

A short while ago read on Mike Creighton’s blog about a contest by Kieth Peters called 25 Lines. The concept is simple – show off what you can do with 25 lines of actionscript. My humble entry was thrown together in the last hour or two before the entry period closed, and is far from mind-blowing – I was surprised at how difficult that 25 line constraint turned out to be. It was also my first foray into using Flash Player 10 and the new Vector class, so I’m glad I had anything at all to submit! It requires FP10, hogs CPU after a while, and requires a page reload if you want to see a new iteration. I’m having problems with the I’m excited to see all 100 entries once judging is complete!

Adobe’s experience design team, XD, has an internal brown bag presentation once a month. I’ve always enjoyed working on the poster series that promotes the event since the organizers allows a little more freeform design direction, and don’t insist on inserting some of the less exciting Adobe branding.

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I have a series of ‘designs’ that originated from my graphics card glitching out. I think too many hours of playing World of Warcraft with a busted fan fried something. In any case, I leveraged the glitching effect and got some interesting output. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to duplicate that glitch since then!

After much procrastination, I grit my teeth and dove into the task of designing this site. A few days later, and Presto! There are still a few tweaks to be done, and bugs to stamp out, but am pleased with the result. I thought I would share a few tidbits about what tools and techniques I wound up using to hack it all together.

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I’m always learning new things in actionscript. And the beauty (and curse) of learning new things in AS3, is that I wind up having to learn even more things outside of the code. In this case I was interested in sorting objects in chromatic order. This turned out to be more complex than i thought with the RGB color space but in the process I generated this nifty color spectrum rendering by cycling through all the values in a color uint. Turns out that in order to achieve this type of task, the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) system is more convenient. Time to do some reading up on this now!

Ever since my first system – a Commodore 64 – I’ve been fascinated by the power of the computer. Whether I was painstakingly copying Basic code from a book into the command line, or furiously twiddling a joystick playing Chucky Egg, I would spend hour upon hour in this wonderful world. A world operating entirely on an alarmingly simple principle – the binary switch. 

Many years later, I’m still exploring that virtual world. When I’m not busy creating user experiences and exploring new technologies with Adobe’s index team, you might find me playing at the intersection of code and design, still trying to wrap my head around all those ones and zeros. Hi, I’m Kim. Welcome to plasticbit.