Originally, i was going to build some accelerometer hardware to capture motion, but I’ve been tremendously busy.  Instead, I decided to take a stab at checking out some of the open source AS Wii libraries (Google Code).  The game itself is nothing to write home to mom, but I am interested in possibly researching the advantages of leveraging advanced inputs such as the WiiMote to better engage children. I think i may extend this game a bit more, and run a controlled group of children playing my game with the WiiMote, and children playing a similar game with the mouse.  Not sure if this would influence any additional knowledge transfer, but may influence children to play longer and more repetitive, which in turn may have some effect.  More on this topic when i totally wrap my head around the idea.

Wii How Tall from Alex Britez on Vimeo.

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I’ve been interested in experimenting with alternative methods of communicating with the computer (without using a mouse), so i decided to start with the webcam.  There have been various methods that have shown up in the past via color detection, motion detection and a slew of others but instead i decided to try making use of a few LED keyrings that my boss gave me.  Hopefully i could find a way to incorporate more kinesthetic solutions for navigating to take advantage of natural movement, and somehow focus it towards education so the navigational process is meaningful.

Bellow is my first test, which turned out to be pretty successful.

You could check out the screencast here DEMO

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I created a very simple game using Away3d and with a A* pathfinding class which is called Detour with some help from Peter Kapelyan, who helped me tweak some of my code to make it 3D friendly.  It’s only a prototype of a game which i probably won’t enhance anytime soon, so I included the source code for anyone that is interested.  If you does anything with it drop me an email so I could check it out.

The game is pretty much a maze that gets created “on the fly” (I really hate that phrase) by intersections that close off on each turn. The goal of the game is to beat the computer to the your homebase which is the space that the computer starts on (sort of like Chinese Checkers, but with one marble and maze) The first person to get to their homebase wins.  Use your arrow keys to move around.

Source View is here, so go bananas (I like that phrase).

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I just started my second semester of graduate school this week, and all of my professor at NYU thus far have brought up using wikis to hand in assignments. Wiki’s are an excellent source for knowledge management in the classroom, especially when you have multiple classes on varying topics. With all the new topics discussed in my classes, it is pretty easy for students to get overloaded with information. I’ve decided to extended my use of wikis to the workplace now, and am in the process of porting over a lot of my code that i reuse like proxies, and that dreaded crossdomain.xml .

I’ve also noticed a lot of professors use of Power Point to to narrate the class discussion. So being that I worked on empressr (a web-based slideshow presentation application), and now use my wiki constantly it only made sense to merge the both. Plus i couldn’t possibly get myself to use some other app asides from the one that I worked on.

The project could be found here unthink media Wiki and could be found on googlecode if anyone is interested in joining the project. Google code SVN repository

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I was doing some research in PDF exporting yesterday which gave me the opportunity to mess around with AlivePDF . This is a library was built by Thibault Imbert to enable Flex to generate PDF and is based on FPDF, a php library.

As a proof of concept i grabbed a quick drawing app to see if i could print out what ever i draw to a PDF. By the looks of the library this test only scratches the surface of its functionality, but it serves my needs at the moment.
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We have add a bunch of new functionality to Empressr Some of the enhancements include and fresh new design, a slew of new transitions, and twitter integration. Also be sure to check out the recording feature in the editor. You could easily create your voice overs within the empressr editor and the assets get automatically placed into your project library.

Below is a quick photo slideshow of my wedding, just about all of them are of my wife since she is much more better looking them me

I’ll post up a more in depth example soon showing some of the more advanced features of empressr.
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I’ve been messing around with the twitter API and have noticed that there where no text components that where Twitter enabled. So I decided to extend Text to be twitter friendly. There are probably a million different ways of doing this but this worked for me the best.

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I’ve been spending a lot of time using twitter, so thought i may as well create a quick little app for changing my status. I’ll be implementing this in a couple experiments that i am going to be working on in the near future. For now, here is a quick little interface for you to tweet me or anyone else.

Unfortunately my company will not allow be release this source yet…

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When character counts are critical as in building a twitter or SMS app you could use services such at tinyurl.com and bit.ly to help save text real-estate. I prefer bit.ly since it’s domain has less characters then tinyurl’s

The code is really quite simple. All that you need to do is communicate with bit.ly ‘s API and it returns the new shortened URL via its API. Check out http://bit.ly/docs for full API.

original call
http://bit.ly/api?url=URL (Example: http://bit.ly/api?url=http://twitabit.com)

bit.ly response:

http://bit.ly/2oCfqc

Seems easy enough, but the problem comes when doing this with in Flex. You will quickly see once you test on your server Flex will alert you that there is a Sandbox violation. This simply means that bit.ly does not have a crossdomain.xml file that grants you permission to receive data from them.
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I was listening to discussion on this topic which has been getting more attention with social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. Companies may be under the impression that they own their brand, however brand is not concrete, so how could it be owned? It is like saying I own my wife’s love or I own my coworkers friendship. Brand is nothing more then a series of actions in order to influence the perception of your audience, much like love or friendship. So I believe that companies are held accountable by their actions, yet it is up to the audience to react to the action. This action and reaction is what molds the brand and identity of the company. So although no one may “own” the brand both the audience and company help mold it collaboratively.

With social channels such as Twitter, this “action and reaction” brand development has the opportunity to grow or tumble at enormous proportions. Companies need to embrace this new way of relaying their message and listen to analyze audience reactions. There is nobody that could express your audiences perception of your brand then the audience itself.

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