We have been working away at that since May of 2010 and all has been going really well. It took up so much of my time that I had no time to update anything on this blog, or even on the http://www.cultcreative.com/ site. That is changing now, I am making sure that I take the time to make some updates… but most, if not all of them with be done VIA the Cult Creative site. I have been going through and updating things on that site for the past week, finally taking the time to make sure that everything is working properly.

I would love it if you would check it out and let me know what you think. I will hopefully be able to start posting to the blog, the labs and the tutorials on a much more frequent basis than I ever did on here.

Here are some links for tracking down what else has been going on for the past 3 years:
http://www.cultcreative.com/
http://www.facebook.com/cultcreative/
http://twitter.com/cultcreative

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I know that it has been a while since my last post on here.  That is because work had really picked up and a couple other things changed over the past summer.  Either way, I am back now.

Here is a little recap of the past 8 months:

• got my multi touch table working but the projector was messed up so i just left it alone and destroyed it last week
• my girlfriend moved to Boulder in August, in January I proposed and we are now engaged
• CP+B was great to me, but I am moving back to Canada to be with my fiancee and closer to friends and family
• Worked on a ton of fun projects with CP+B and I am really going to miss them

That is basically it, a lot of work but also a lot of personal things have been going on.  Either way, the future is promising !! I have teamed up with a couple of individuals to put together a little agency that we are calling Cult Creative.  You can follow us on twitter @ www.twitter.com/cultcreative or become a fan on Facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cult-Creative/107701979253194 .  We are working on the site over the next couple of weeks and updates will come for that soon.

We are on the road for the next couple weeks, my fiancee and I are heading up the west coast to take a little break from the world and enjoy ourselves a little bit.  I am sitting in Santa Fe, NM right now and we are off to somewhere in Arizona today and possibly California tomorrow.  The ultimate destination being Toronto the weekend of FITC.

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The first step was to do a lot of planning. How big should it be? What do I need to build it? How am I going to do something like this when I don’t know anything about the technology? Well, I decided to go ahead with it based on the list of parts that were in that tutorial plus a couple things of my own.

Once all of the parts were ordered, I decided to spec out and start building the box to house the screen and eventually the projector. Here are a couple pictures of the construction process.

Once that was built enough for me to start on the electrical aspects of the screen (and once all the parts arrived), I started on that. Cut out the corners of my acrylic and struggled with my first ever electrical circuit. Mounted the lasers in some air-drying clay and plugged it in. It worked on the first test (with a lot of little adjustments) and I have the following video to show you my first test.

There is still a lot to do with the setup, including adding the projector and a screen to touch, but it is on its way and I am very happy with it thus far. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks.

thanks, marc

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I am in the mood to write a couple more tutorials but I would like to take suggestions as to what to write about. A couple of ideas that I have had are the following:

Box2d Physics – a thorough introduction
Something more advanced with Papervision
How to write Pure AS, no more need for Document classes
Intro to Away 3D
something else?

let me know what you think and what you want to see?

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I quickly realized that I don’t have enough time to make this thing on my own, but being stubborn, I tried anyways. Well, I haven’t had time to even really think about it for over a month now but would like to get back at it.

What I have decided to do is to try and create a team of 3 or 4 developers to try and get this this off the ground and working, because I really feel that it would be a benefit to the Flash community. If you would like to help out, I am looking for a couple people that have experience in both Flex and Papervision.

Here are some of the areas that we need some specific help with :
Interface Design
Flex Development
Papervision Development

If you are interested, you can check out www.paper-face.com to see the app and email me at marc@marcpelland.com and we can get going on this. One thing to note is that there is no compensation for the work done on this project but I would like all involved to take it seriously. It will be a good learning experience and hopefully a helpful tool for the industry.

thanks,
Marc Pelland

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• Overview
• Setup
• Create Your First Project with Augmented Reality
• Optimize and Customize the Settings
• Tutorial Files
• Finished Scene

Overview

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality is a technology that allows you to superimpose images into real-time environments. For the purposes of this tutorial, you just need to know that it reads a marker (shape/symbol), interprets the angle and size of that marker and then allows you to place objects at that size and position on the screen (or whatever your medium is).

Here are a couple example videos:

Mini Video and the GE Site

What is FLARToolKit?

To start with ARToolKit is the development package that has allowed developers to tap into the power of Augmented Reality. FLARToolKit is an Actionscript 3 port of the Java version of the toolkit.

What do I need for this tutorial?

In this tutorial, we are going to use FLAR Manager, which is a framework setup to make the combination of Papervision 3D and FLARToolKit easy and quick to setup/use.

If you would like to simply use FLARToolKit (or just get a little more information about it) clik on the following link: http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en

Otherwise, download FLARManager (using v0.1 in this tutorial) from http://words.transmote.com/wp/20090309/flarmanager-v01/ . FLARManager actually comes with a build of FLARToolKit in it and you can get it for AS3/FP9 or AS3/FP10 (we are using FP10).

You will also need FlashDevelop or another Actionscript editing tool. In this tutorial I am going to be compiling my code directly from FlashDevelop, but feel free to use the compiler/method of your choice.

You should also get a pattern generator so that you can create your own patterns (markers). Go here for more details: http://www.squidder.com/2009/03/05/for-nerds-only-custom-flar-markers-explained/

What else should I know?

You should be aware of the fact that there is a licensing fee to use check here: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/license.html for more details.

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In March 2008, I decided that I needed to actually start my own blog, it was something that I had thought about for a while but I never really pictured myself writing anything. It ended up being a great idea because it has pushed me to try new things so that I have something to post about. I have tried to use my blog as a place to share code and thoughts about the industry. So far, I would say that it has been a success and I thank all of you for staying with me through the year.

I thought that today I would mix things up a little bit by switching up my theme for my site. I wanted something with more room for the side columns now that I have my tweets feeding in to my site as well. So I hope this doesn’t screw anything up!

anyways, have a good one. Marc

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After all of the tests and playing around that I have done with face/motion detection in Flash and Processing Quasimondo posted an optimized version of the OpenCV port to AS3. This is something that I have been waiting for someone to do for quite some time. I thought I would just post my first test with it and forward you to his page since anything i would say about it would just be repetition.

To view my test click here (need a webcam): www.marcpelland.com/opencv

In my example, I just slightly modified Mario’s class to allow for an image to be placed instead of just a box being drawn. I have already seen an example of 3d and this library being used at: http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/643

Quasimondo’s blog posting: http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000687.php

thanks, marc

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A couple of years ago, when I was working at Critical Mass in Calgary, AB and noticed a couple things with the team that I was with that could make everything go faster. When I took a step back to evaluate what was happening I noticed that all of the issues that I was experiencing were rooted in having every person that was touching a project pay a little bit more attention to detail.

When I started my web career, I was at a smaller company that didn’t have the ability to get a huge account and throw 70 people at it to get it done; there were just a few of us on every account. So many projects were just pushed through that we didn’t have all the time in the world to make sure that layers were named and all code was documented.

As I got into the world of larger agencies I started to notice how detrimental this was to the efficiency of future projects, as well as the maintenance of past projects (already kind of knew that one). So what I did was I set up a meeting with most of the team and we talked about what people’s roles were, where they fit into the greater scheme of things, and all of the little things that individuals could be doing to make everything easier for all involved.

Some of it was obvious, just follow best practices and standards and things will run smoothly but it really seemed like people needed a reminder of a lot of things. I am not innocent on this either, I have been rushed through countless projects that just kept getting messier as the days went by. I thought that I would write this to remind people of the basics and hopefully get them to pay a little bit more attention to even the smallest things.

Names:

When creating anything, whether it be a Photoshop file or a Flash file make sure that you name everything clearly. Build everything as though someone else is going to have to look at it and understand it at some point down the line. Name all layers and assets with descriptive names, try and group similar assets and layers so that every bit of the file is quickly and easily accessible.

Layer Comps:

If you are working in Photoshop and passing files to designers, layer comps are a great resource for working with your content. If you haven’t heard of layer comps I strongly recommend looking into how to work with them. You can keep things organized, cut down file size, and make sure that it is clear what your thoughts were when designing.

Documentation:

I tend to write a little too much documentation in my code these days, just to be certain that anyone that touches my files know what was going on in my mind. One key thing to keep in mind with documentation is that it is not just for you, so keep it a little bit descriptive for others to understand. When documenting your code try to picture that your code is going online, not just what is produced by it, use this as a motivation to keep it clean and documented. That always helps motivate me because I have always been a little self-conscious about my code so I write a lot of documentation to help out.

Clean Code:

Don’t go through your files and name things randomly x and y. Come up with some short, succinct names and always follow a naming convention. This comes in handy a lot because you don’t have to go looking through all the definitions in the script to find that gameTimer is a game timer as opposed to having a variable named gt.

Know Your Team:

I have worked (and still work) at companies with multiple offices where I haven’t had the chance to meet many of my team members. This doesn’t have to be a problem thanks to other forms of communication, but communication is something that should really be pushed. When starting on a project, I always find it best to layout the some sort of plan for putting everything together. If you are a programmer just blindly getting files from a designer then you may not get what you want. If you are a designer preparing files for a developer, you may be doing more than you have to.

A good example of this is when there are a couple of different stages in design/development that are sharing assets. Let’s say a designer creates a PSD and passes that off to a motion designer who spends days animating things over and over again. This might prove to be a waste of time because the developer can re-use just the first animation and do the rest. These are things that should be discussed beforehand. With experience, you will eventually start picking up on aspects that can be coded and those that should be manually done. Until then, just talk.

Know Your Own Role:

This one has always been a big one for me. Being a developer, I am generally one of the last touch-points on a project before it gets out the door. This means that towards the end of the project if anyone has an issue with the way something looks or works, they generally come to me first. This is where I have to make the decision if that is something that I should do. I can make little revisions to positioning and layout but I know that anything even slightly beyond that should be done by or with a designer to ensure that it is done right and won’t have to be done again.

Knowing your role basically comes down to knowing your strengths in a given project and knowing when to go to others to use their strengths. If you are at an agency, there is generally someone that you can turn to that can do something quicker and better than you if the task is not in your specific area.

Overall, Just Pay Attention

In the end, it all comes down to just paying attention and spending the extra couple minutes on the fine details. Once you get into the habit of doing things that I listed above, they become easier and quicker and you may even find that your work is not just getting easier to work with but it is getting better and you are getting things done faster.

- Thanks, Marc

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With actionscript you are able to customize these menus and add a little extra interactivity to your pages. Even though most people don’t right click on anything, some people do. To have something there for them to find and use could prove to be useful. It could be anything… credits, navigation, easter eggs, helpers, etc.

Context menus take very little time and effort to add, and show that you are paying a little bit extra attention to detail when creating a site / application.

here is a quick and easy guide to using AS3 Context Menus > http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2009/03/11/understanding-as3-context-menus/

thanks, marc

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