Speaker: Craign Swan from CRASH!MEDIA

In recent years Flash has broadened as an Interactive tool offering more than just a platform for animations, websites, games and RIA’s, but a whole new world of Interactive possibilities. Engaging Installations. Alternative Interfaces. Calm Computing. Physical Prototyping. Interactive Environments. Making things and Exploring the User as the Interface.

Craig has been a regular speaker at FITC over the years. He never fails to impress – this year was the best by far. Craig’s presentation covers a lot of ground, and this post doesn’t do it justice, however, here are some notes I scribbled down:

• Flash has an ambient awareness – microphone and camera capabilities provide flash with an awareness of what is happening in its environment. Although, this control has been around for a little while by now, a new suite of tools has increased possibilities. Sophistication is limitless. Many new ideas and possibilities with new tools such as bitmap toolkit and new video tools.
• Interaction with camera enables new interfaces including gesture capturing and more interactive user-interfacing. Use color tracking and mapping objects to colour. Technically, poll the screen for the presence of a colour and perform various procedures depending on location and intensity (or any variable) of colour.
• Input devices. [unfortunately, my notes get more sparse as his presentation goes on] IPAC device, a simple input controller, allows developers to piece together their own interfaces. You can use any type of sensor to generate the simulation of a keypress and in turn capture that event within Flash. PhidgetRFID is an easy to use and easy to integrate RFID reader. Make board, tilio board, controller board allow the designer/developer to create alternate output. Monome 8″x8″ controller is a input/output device that is a 10×10 grid of LEDs that double as an input device. Craig was using this as a video mixing board. MIDI controller with a number of knobs provides a wide range of real time control. Craig was using this to interact with a live video feed in realtime controlling various aspects of colour and timing. Connect to WII controller through bluetooth (max msp).

For examples of Craig’s work, go to the CRASH!MEDIA site and click on “Labs”.   A lot of it is in there. Enjoy.

HistoryShots Genealogy of Pop & Rock Music: Covering the time period from 1955 to 1978, more than 700 artists and 30 styles of music are mapped in currents flowing from left-to-right. For each performer, the length of time that he/she remained a major hit maker is provided.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

newsmap: Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods