Jumped back on the the LED experiment tonight. This time i extended the events of the 3D object to handle single and multiple LED detection events.  If the 3D object only detects a single cursor then it only rotates the axis of the object being clicks. If it detects multiple cursors then it rotates the entire environment.

Eventually i think i will make this a multiuser molecule docking simulation, but for now i am just gonna consintrate on getting a decent prototype. This weekend I am gonna extend the events to the smaller objects so i could collaborate with another player, and eventually match poloraties of the molecules.  Should be pretty interesting once it is functional.

I could think of many different types of applications for this type of navigation. However, there are also many environmental issues, such as interference from objects with bright highlights such as metal, or direct light. One option that may solve that is using infrared LED’s instead and cover the webcam lens with a filter to be able to see the infrared.

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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 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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