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FITC San Francisco

San Francisco
FITC began as a pure Flash event back in 2002. Since then it has evolved into a complete Design and Technology event that encompasses a wide array of crafts including Flash, Processing, motion graphics and design. With a lot of recent progress in the interactive world, topics surrounding Flash have become fairly heated and there has been some very exciting developments as a result. So when I heard that FITC was throwing down in the Bay Area, I jumped on the opportunity and convinced my lovely StruckAxiom peeps to send me.

Having never been to an FITC event I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Mostly, I was expecting crowds of people and packed presentations. I was very pleased to find that the rooms never quite filled up and every session I went to was very personable.

Some hot topics at the conference were motion detection, voice recognition, processing, programmatic art, 3D, PixelBender, Unity, Cinder, Open Frameworks, multiuser Flash applications and Flash on mobile devices. Needless to say there was an abundance of talent and knowledge under one roof.

There were a couple common themes at this FITC. One of those themes is the acceptance of failure. Failure can lead to some beautiful, unexpected results and at the very least, knowledge. Also: step outside your comfort zone. Don’t spend all your time in one specialty, explore fresh boundaries and learn new things. Lastly, collaborate without an ego, find fun in your work and be passionate about what you do.

Some memorable moments for me were Ralph Hauwert’s in depth, sometimes confusing, interpretations of his work, Robert Hodgin’s mind blowing Processing and Cinder experiments, Shaun Hamontree’s wacky but hilarious and inspirational presentation of MK12’s in-house work, Didier Brun’s in-depth session on voice recognition in flash and of course Yugo Nakamura’s closing presentation. There wasn’t a presentation that I went to that wasn’t inspirational.

I learned more at this conference than I expected. I was also exposed to more expertise than ever. I will absolutely attend FITC again if given the chance. Best of all, I took a bunch of notes(mostly links to great resources).
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Musical Chairs Across the Nation… without the Chairs.

What’s the easiest way to get a band label? Hard work? Kissing up? Paying people off? False.

The easiest way is to film your band and throw it up on YouTube and let the free world vote on how good or “ungood” you are. That was the idea behind freecreditscoreband.com. Virginia-based Martin Agency came to us to help bring the idea to life, so that bands across the nation could subject themselves to the scrutiny of each other, and have their family vote for them as much as they could.

A few samples:

Turns out Darth Vader used to be really into GWAR, and also good financial knowledge, allowing him to high-kick his way into fame:

To see all the entries, vote and even enter, get on over to freecreditscoreband.com

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Multi-Touching the Future

When our friends at PepsiCo (in connection with our other friends at Undercurrent) contacted us about an interactive installation piece for their Senior Management Meeting, we knew two things: 1) We didn’t have much time; and 2) We wanted to build something beautiful and intuitive. I suppose we also knew something else: We could do it.

In just a few short weeks, PepsiCo asked us to help them visualize some of the social conversations happening around the PepsiCo brand. What we delivered was a simple, elegant multi-touch installation—packed with information. During the multi-day conference, PepsiCo executives could walk up to the 60-inch screen and use their hands to navigate the virtual space. In addition to the conversational excerpts, execs could also dive into a single conversation to read the full text. A Twitter panel also illustrated the real-time conversation.

We’re not too humble to say that our installation was among the most popular in the venue. With a business-minded focus on online conversations about nutrition and the environment and a fun factor that bordered on futuristic awesomeness (A 60-inch touchscreen! Grab the jetpacks!), this installation is set to evolve. Stay tuned!

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Bustin’ Bricks: Behind the Scenes

Today’s Site of the Day on FWA is none other than the recently unleashed LEGOCLICK.com, designed and developed by the dudes and lady-dudes of Struck/Axiom in association with Pereira & O’Dell. (If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out.) To mark the occasion, we’d like to share a technical peak behind the curtain of one of the more popular features of the site – removing a block of content.

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Augmented Reality – Experiments with Processing 1.0

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I have been experimenting with processing and it’s applications for real-time image manipulation. I was inspired by and art show by Dr. Woo Hoo.  He had displayed some jellyfish which would react to movement from a live camera feed. Using my handy web cam I started to try it out.

The first example takes captures the motion of my movement by comparing current and previous pixel brightness. Whenever there is motion detected in the pixel space of one of the circles, the circle grows.

Motion Circles

The second example takes the bitmap data read in from the camera and creates a 3d point/pixel version. I am using a sin function to contract and expand the points in zspace.

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The third example generates the points in 3d space based on how much movement is detected. This really starts to push the processor especially when its exporting an image sequence, but it’s still pretty neat.

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Kyality

Flexing Our Muscles

For 2009, Struck’s SLC office is the new venue for the Flex User’s Group. Come join us for some serious geeking out here at Struck or online using Adobe Acrobat Connect.

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Google can now search Flash

Google has announced that it has improved its algorithm to extract textual data out of any kind of Flash file, working with Adobe’s Flash Player. This is huge news for a shop like Struck, wehere we specialize in user experiences that often showcase Flash. I am dying to know how well it works and what the limitations are!
Read about it here

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laxcat

We Made a Discovery

So you may have seen the premiere of “When We Left Earth” on the Discovery Channel last Sunday at 9 Eastern. If not, don’t fret. It’s an six part HD event! How do you know so much about this show, you ask? Well, we’ve just made many, many banners on the subject and that kind of repetition is pretty effective.

At any rate, I though I’d share a banner that turned out to be a little too fancy Grizzly Park full movie for the website it was produced for, and unfortunately won’t be part of the campaign. It’s not super complicated, but is a cool simple use of Papervision3D buy Small Soldiers Bon Cop, Bad Cop on dvd The Medallion movie .

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Gameratizer 5000™

Here at Struck we’ve developed a sophisticated piece of software that allows us to turn employees into digital characters. Brandon & Corey (pictured below) were our first test subjects.

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Corey Game

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Flash Workshop

We have talked to enough people that would love a Flash workshop here in Salt Lake that it would be pretty stupid of us not to put one together. So, now, the question is what kind of material would you like us to cover? If you would be interested in attending a workshop on Flash at our headquarters, leave a comment on this post. Let us know what level of Flash experience you have so we can gauge what would be the most useful for the community here. Let’s Flash it up!

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