One of the overall themes that seems to be coming through (or that I'm latching onto the most) at this year's New York Flash Forward is Flash and interacting with the physical world.
Rob Hall presented on "Kiosks and Interactive Exhibits." He has extensive experience in this area and presented some of the very cool things that he's had the opportunity to work on. He demonstrated a Flash-based coin counting machine available in certain banks. Additionally, he had two very cool sample applications. One was a magnetic-strip scanner that connected to his computer via the USB port. He ran his driver's license through the scanner and, via Flash, communicated with a web service to pull down information about the license scanned. The beauty of this is that the magnetic strip had a "Keyboard Wedge" driver that simulated a keyboard pressing the numbers that were scanned from the magnetic strip. Flash was able to read the information from the scanner via a simple onKeyDown method - Flash had no idea the data was coming from the scanner because it looked exactly like a keyboard. The other example application Rob showed was a barcode scanner. Again, it connected via USB and simulated keypresses whenever a barcode was read in.
Branden Hall demonstrated some very cool stuff that he's done recently with an I-PAC. He built floor tiles that could be connected together via ethernet jacks, plugged into the I-PAC, and then read by the computer as keyborad presses (acting just like buttons). Then, he fired up a Flash movie with ladybugs running around the screen with some squares lined up in the background. He ran across the stage stepping on the tiles, and any ladybug that was in the square on the screen corresponding to the square on the floor that he stepped on went splat. Think dance dance revolution, but all done in Flash. Very amazing and inspirational.
Making Things have an exhibit set up that is just downright cool. In Flash, you can leverage the ActionScript 2 class libraries they provide to do some awesome things with sensors and servos and such that you can plug into a board that interfaces with your computer. This is one of those things that you need to see because words don't do it justice.
Branden showed using Making Thing's Teleo to build a Flash interface for controlling a remote control car, and another for playing a game of pong with old-school joysticks as well. Very fun, cool stuff.
Something similar was Ze Frank's interactive frog. This is a fun little piece that takes input from a microphone and animates the mouth of a frog. If you get a chance, check it out and have some fun with it.
Not demonstrated at the conference, but still worthy noting, are phidgets and Marcos Weskamp's experiments with them.
Also, see GalaxyGoo's entry on this topic and Flash Magazine's Making Things piece.
SWEET!!!
The remote control car interface Brandon did is really inspiring and the phidget stuff looks really cool.
Thanks for highlights; I knew I could count on you for the goods! =)
-erik
http://www.benga.li
go to EXPERIENCE, then to MICRO
and then PLUME
this is a feather that moves given mic activity ...
I did another with flying birds (they are in the same section (MICRO) and they are called OISEAUX 1 and OISEAUX 2)
I hope you enjoy these ...
anyway, I wish I was there maaaaan
Hey Darron - it was cool to get to hang out at the show had a great time - I just wanted to mention that the mag stripe reader example that I used to scan in the drivers license and display all the information was done entirely in Flash without a web service - the one example that did use a web service was the symbol bar code scanner - that one used a free web service that talks to a public UPC database to pull in product info that individuals have contributed to the database (similar to CDDB and FreeDB for CD's) it also went out to another web service and pulled in a dynamic JPG file that represented another type of barcode format. All the source code to these files will be up this weekend at http://www.impossibilities.com/ff2004ny/ - I havent had much luck in uploading to my server from the hotel or the wireless connection here. See ya! -Rob
Related note, we use a Symbol bar code scanner on an iPaq for a limo service here. We scan bar codes(employee id and then the car id) into a Flash form, where it's stores the data in a shared object for synching later on.
Just another example showing that Flash isn't just for splash screens :)
have you seen marcos' "remote driver 2" project? he debutted it at MAX japan this year (maybe march or so?).
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/remotedriver2/
it lets YOU drive the remote car in TOKYO from your browser using flashcomm and his custom built phidget interface library.
email him to remind him to fix the links for some nice video action.
- dan
disclaimer: i was sitting on marcos' couch when he built this and am blatantly pimping my friend's project to try and prevent branden from getting all the credit (even though branden is cool and deserves lots of credit for other stuff).