Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Head Conference... the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Aral Balkan recently uploaded all of the videos from the recent Head Conference. Now I can go back and watch the ones I missed. How many conferences allow you to do that??? If you can't already tell, I've been a huge fan of the Head Conference and have been very impressed with how it turned out (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3).

Last night I took some time and went back to watch Mario Klingemann's "Pixel be Here". I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was the presentation video recorded, but also all of the chat and presenter's webcam. Which for Mario's presentation, this feature was very important. He talked about using "MacGyver" like techniques with Flash's API to explore new areas and discover new capabilities of Flash. In this presentation he focused on different Bitmap tools to interact with the webcam. At one point he even used QR-Code to tell his presentation which slide to go to, which was very impressive. Then, instead of getting into the nitty gritty code, he jumped into the Aviary suite and demonstrated how to go about finding QR-Code in the webcam by comparing Aviary Filters to AS methods. By the end of it, we were watching Flash hone in on the QR-Code and start to use projective mappings to translate a piece of paper into 3D space. With a little more time and some papervision icing, this could become a very cool trick. (Mr. Doob mentioned in the chat box that a Japanese team has already taken the first steps... this video is incredible: Fireworks). Needless to say it was a very impressive presentation, and I highly recommend watching it once it goes public.

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