Whatevers clever!

If any one happened to read my last post and followed the link to jasonwilliamson.tv/blog, then you've discovered there's nothing there. Really I've been too busy to do anything much other then eat and sleep. So what could possibly keep me this busy? Work. But good work. I have actually enjoyed the whole hellish experience thus far of tackling projects and working under deadlines. At Decode Entertainment I had been working on numerous flash games based thier cartoons, and our small interactive team created an iphone game which is titled Whack 'O' Lantern. It is available to download free at itunes.

Here are some screens from the iphone app.

jasonwilliamson.tv/blog

Hey just taking a minute to redirect anybody who has found this blog to my personal website blog. I am a flash developer and that is basically what jasonwilliamson.tv is all about. This year has been really good with highlights that include obvisously, Sheridan College's IMM course, Papervision Course taught by John Grden, learning how to code with Flex 3, to name a few. So check out jasonwilliamson.tv/blog.

What is Social Media?

Wayne MacPhail was last week’s guest speaker at Sheridan’s Interactive Multimedia class. His topic was Social Media, but he started by explaining Web 2.0. Which is a clever marketing term, but also a movement of applications from desktop to web, that are task driven, and user friendly. You often see citrusy colours and plenty of white space with Web 2.0, e.g. twitter, Flickr. What Web 2.0 does is encourage community where people come together and work on a common product.

Now by using a science example where sugar is dissolved in water, making a supersaturated solution, and if something like a string placed in the solution and let settle. Crystals will form around the string. Wayne MacPhail compared the solution to the content rich internet, and the string as the idea or application. With the outcome being collaborative content, groups, community, conversations around content, because content is a catalyst for community.

Social media is of all that, and as Wayne broke down this media in to sub topics the term became fully illuminated. Here are a couple of categories he explained in detail.

Social Media is…..

Local first

Viral

Granular

A conversation

An eco system not a monoculture

It was a lot of information, and very well presented. Using a few of examples of the most popular web applications out there, it’s easy to see that Wayne MacPhail is right on with the social media concept. And as the web movement is now shifting towards web applications moving to the desktop. With the release of adobe Air on Monday, and Microsoft’s Silverlight, social media is becoming more relevant than ever before.

Real News Junkies

Wayne MacPhail's website

Twitter

del.icio.us

Mogulus

Interactive walls and a Hydrolophone. From dinosaurs to a cyborg

The IMM class traveled to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), February 8th to meet its Director of New Media, Brian Porter. He has been working on new ways to deliver information, and share some of the ROMs great stories. Like the revamped dinosaur exhibit at the newly open crystal. Where touch screen panels allow people to cycle through topics they want to learn about at each specific site. Which is interesting because it adds interaction, instead of people just walking around and looking they’re able to select things and involve themselves. I would like to see more of that at museums because there are a lot of stories to know about and aside from touch screens there are many more possibilities to deploy some kind of interaction that utilizes new media. But a point that Brian Porter brought up is that there are so many visitors and things have to be a 100% dependable to work all the time.
The museum also had a larger interactive wall that replaced that huge amount of plaques that you’d normally see listing all the people who have donated something to the museum. A good idea accomplished with the use of Gesture Tek technology for touch panels. Now people might actually stop and look at all those names, they could even learn about exhibits right there too.
Apart from the main exhibits there was an interesting room with a three projection screen TV front which was really engaging, and tells different stories about our history. Cool thing about listening to stories in a museum is then getting to see some the stuff that was talked about, and you appreciate it more.
The IMM class then ventured over to Steve Mann’s gallery slash work shop where his Hydrolophone was on display. Steve Mann is the world’s first cyborg and an inventor. If you’ve been to the Toronto science center recently and noticed you can make music with the water fountain in the front of the building. That is Steve Mann’s Hydrolophone. He played us a couple tunes on the prototype that he had working in the back. And it really spits out some good sounds, quite literally in fact. Anyone close enough to his playing was bound to get wet cause it squirts out water, that’s just how it works. It’s really neat and fun to play, but then again anything that involves water sports is just that much more fun. I would be happy to see some Hydrolophones in a park where people could have fun with it.

The Royal Ontario Museum
Hydrolophone on youtube
Trip photos
WearComp.org
Steve Mann's Wiki

Developing for mobile platform

James Eberhadt who is a technical lead developing for mobile phone platforms stopped by the Sheridan IMM class this week to discuss some of what he does. During his presentation he invited the class to text him with any questions. Classic.

Everybody knows cell phones by now, but when you’re developing applications for mobile there are a fair bit of things to consider. I personally haven’t owned a cell phone for a while and a brief overview of terms was well received. For example the GPRS network connection, SMS / MMS, along with new areas like GPS, and even 2D barcodes.

Using your phones camera you can now through the internet upload your pics to your Facebook, or to your Flickr. Using Google photo your image information Time/Date along with the GPS location of the cell phone at the time will place your photo on a Google map of the world in the exact location of where you took it. I think that this is a good example of how powerful these mobile applications can be. Another example would be Nokia's Sports Tracker, which allows people to track their jogging/cycling/skiing route via GPS. I thought these examples were very cool.

Even though most phones have the ability to use Java as an application platform, I am looking forward to using Flash Lite 3 and creating my own apps. Much to my dismay, Flash Lite works with ActionScript 2.0 not 3.0! Even though it came along with CS3. You can look forward to seeing my applications in the future. They might even be found useful with any luck.

James Eberhadt has instructed classes at George Brown College, Toronto as well as students in Beijing. He has worked on projects such as theborder.ca, seductiveshorts.com, burnttoastopera.com and deafplanet.com. Check out his personal website at eberhardt.ca.

Photos on the map

Nokia Nseries

Sports Tracker

Simon Conlin at Sheridan College

Friday November 30^th, at Sheridan College in Oakville Ontario, Simon Conlin co-founder of FlashintheCan or FITC as it’s known. It is the world’s largest Adobe user group, and is a globally recognized event. He visited with the IMM class to discuss some news and views.

Simon is a consultant for interactive media, and has been since the early days of flash. He recently has been involved with the Pixel gallery that just open in Toronto. The gallery features many artists in the field of interactive design and functionality. Artists from all over are show cased in the gallery. Some examples that he talked about included interactive walls where people could play instruments on, and art that reacted to your movement. One of the artists whose work is on display is Zack Booth Simpson. Who has some really interesting and fun pieces.

Simon has been in the interactive side of business for quite some time, considering it is relatively new. He has a good understanding of the industry and talked about some inspiring ideas. Where this technology could be in the future? Nobody really knows. Things do kind of happen virally, for example the WII’s popularity. Maybe more people will see benefits of applying interactive technology to their own lives.

webcamtastic.com

Zach Booth Simpson

multi touch sensor

Pixel gallery

iBar

Gesture Technology

On Friday, October 12, 2007, Sheridan College’s IMM class field trip took us to the Gesture-Tek offices located in down-town Toronto. At the front door there is a TV. When you move around you actually are hitting and changing things on the screen. This was the first time I’ve seen anything like this, and it was really fun. I probably should have acknowledged the women at the front desk but I was too busy playing on the screen.

Shortly after, the class was inside the office and being presented to by Gesture-Tek’s President and Co founder Vincent John Vincent, but how much can you learn in an hour? Actually, a lot! He took the time and showed us a bunch of his different inventions, which range from interactive floor displays to air pointers that function like a mouse.

There is so many implications for this technology it is really amazing. Recently the world’s leading cell phone company, DoCoMo has made Gesture-Tek’s technology available on the cell phones in Japan. Motion is captured through the phones camera, which makes it possible to play games similar to the Wii. Plus I think overall the ideas are great, I played a soccer goalie in one of the games, it really works up a sweat fast.

By the end of it all, we left everything like how we found it, because you can’t really break anything that you don’t touch.

YouTube video

Gesture-Tek

Rehab video example

DoCoMo

XBox360 gesture games