UnitZeroOne

“Pixel Bender” ? Really ?

[Fill in my excuse for not posting in such a long time]. There’s so much to tell, hence the weird title. Let’s start of with todays news; Adobe renames Hydra to Pixel Bender. They actually did it….now…it might be me…but wasn’t Hydra a way cooler name then “Pixel Bender” ? At least we’ll be able to make Bender references all the time now…adding to nerd-status. The cool thing ? Bender’s brain is a MOS6502 … the same cpu which for instance, also powered the best machine of all times.

Puppet Interview

So, moving on from that news. Over the last months I’ve done several interviews. I was reluctant to post them, but come to think of it, why ? You are reading this page so you’re at least interested in what I have to say. The best interview as of yet was with Gideon, one of the worlds best designers. In all honesty, “jet-lagged” as I was, I wasn’t at my best, so these interviews might entertain you more; Joshua Davis, Hugh Elliot, Moock&Gmunk, Seb-Lee Delisle.

FITC & rePhlex and Flash Player 10

Of course, all of this was recorded at the FITC Toronto 2008 conference. First off all, thanks to the FITC Organisation…you guys did an awesome job. The conference had an excellent vibe … (except for that annoying drunk dude at the front door on Tuesday…you know who you are), and I had a great time hanging with you all. I did a sold-out workshop on day 1, day 2 a panel, with Adobe’s Justin, Richard, Lee, Joa from Hobnox and Mr. Paperworld: Trevor.

On day 3 I did my session…I was shocked to find the room literally packed with people….and was somewhat nervous throughout some moments in my session, but as it seems by the feedback, people really enjoyed it. The reviews I found in my incoming links are at least very positive.During this session I also got to talk about rePhlex again, my new toy project. rePhlex is meant to be a lightweight, realtime image processing and syncing/eventing library for site/example and demo purposes. It’s been overgoing some heavy changes and refactoring…you’ll all just have to wait a bit more.

Another thing I really enjoyed doing in my session was that I was allowed to show some hydra Pixel Bender running inside Flash Player 10. Yes….you missed a sneak of Flash Player 10’s awesome power.

On day 4 of the conference I had a taped conversation with Keith Peters, which, next to the obligatory joke he made at my cost, to get back at me for sleeping a bit to long, we both hoped won’t bore you too much…you put to actionscript / math / graphic nerds on a couch…what do you think happens ?

I saw some sessions myself, but was really unlucky with my taste vs the schedule. Things I can quickly remember seeing; Seb-Lee Delisle, Mario Klingemann, Keith Peters, Robert Hodgin, Erik Natzke and many others. Robert’s session (the last of the conference) absolutely blew me away. And I do love Radiohead!

So, that would wrap up FITC Toronto (and Amsterdam too).

Upcoming Conferences

I’m looking forward to speak at this months Multimania. In June there’s going to be FITC Chicago…later on this year many more, amongst which for instance; Singularity 08. I’m really unlucky to have to miss out on this years FlashBelt…..hope you all have a good time there anyway.

Goodbye Earthmine ! Hello new works ?

As some of you, attending one of my sessions or workshops earlier this year might know, most of my commercially available time went to the Earthmine project. That work ended for me last week and after working on one project for such an extended period of time (7 months+) and some rest, I’m now really looking forward too and open for new jobs and work..I’m not sure what I’ll do yet and am still contemplating on what I really want to do as the “next” thing. In the mean time I’ll be working on smaller freelance jobs. And if you have something you’d like me to work on….ping me.

Playing with Hydra and image algorithms

Another post coming up today will explain some more. With my work on rePhlex and Hydra, I’m having a blast doing image manipulation algorithms….one of my experiments was image dithering and half-toning…with as a result a new open source project. More on that in my next post…which will appear on the all new and revamped AXNA / Adobe Feeds! Welcome back !

Ok, so I wanted to post this one earlier; an extremely realistic looking 3D interactive portrait of a girl….it’s kind of weird looking and a bit spooky, don’t look at her too long It’s impressive though.

So, what is this ? Well, a bit of simple research (read, firebug) led me too motionportrait.com. Unfortunately, that’s in japanese. That site has the same girl on it, as well as links to several other implementations of the technology…including this hilarious one : hige-chen (love that tune). But also, to the still very cool Rec-You campaign. I’m betting we’ll see a couple of more implementations of this in the near future.

Another thing that caught my attention today was a mail from the creator of the isometric engine ffilmation. Very nice work indeed! The name is derived from the old-skool filmation engine, used to create various gaming titles for the old 8-bit platforms. Looking forward to see progress on it. Related : also, make sure you check out the Alternativa3D engine which was previously isometric only also, but now “full 3D”..impressive stuff.

A bit late, but I didn’t see any MXNA post on this; the first beta for Gnash is out. From the release post : “Gnash is a GPL’d SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes.“.

Gnash already made the news last year, but this time they’ve got a beta…

Honestly, I’m not really impressed. One of the goals for this release seems to be to make youtube work on it. I don’t think this means that good to the Flash community. Even if Gnash grows up (and eventually supports SWF9 / AS3), I don’t really like the idea of “another” player. In my opinion, if it becomes a broader supported version of the player, it will just cause rips in the ubiquity and cross-platform nature of Flash….something which is undeniably one of the biggest strenghts of the platform.

What Gnash might provide is a deeper insight of the workings of the Flash Player, which might eventually enable us to optimize our code for it more and more. It might also inspire Adobe to make the Flash Player available on more os’es ? Let’s hope so. Maybe someone will port it to the Iphone

A little offtopic, but I found this one interesting. Everybody knows the VHS/Betamax story. Sony bigshots didn’t want to publish porn on their superior format Betamax and as an result the public fled to VHS. Or so the story goes. Now here’s a bunch of geeks ‘turning the trick around’. How would you get the world to start using IPv6? Well, maybe if we offer some free pr0n ? (I’m guessing comment spam will skyrocket on my blog, after this post).The Great IPv6 Experiment promises that after a user converts his good trusty old IPv4 protocol based connection to the newer superior IPv6 variant, the users will be offer some (10Gb) porn content. Why ? Because they want you to move to IPv6. Not that long ago IPv6 would be mentioned in one breath with that other ‘new’ tech : Web 2.0. While that’s still going strong, the buzz around IPv6 is kind of out….tired, so to say. This stunt will surely at least get the technology some renewed attention, and maybe even accelerate the implementation of it. We’ll have to go IPv6 one day anyway,since IP adresses will be running out, especially now all these new little devices like mobiles and such are going to need their own unique ip too.As a sidenote to this story; my ISP XS4ALL, has been offering free IPv6 access to their huge binary news-server (can you spell out w-a-r-e-z), newszilla for a long long long time, presumably for the same purpose (getting IPv6 used, that is).Surely not all new technology can leverage pr0n as the main content / marketing trick. Turns out, “actors” in these “nature movies” might not be flattered by the HDTV revolution. Also, some believe that the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be fought and won in exactly the same way that age-old VHS/Beta story went.To keep this post at least a little flash related; here’s my thought on that in relation to our industry…..I’ve always thought that after the initial usage as banner phase Flash would be one of the most used content delivery platforms for the worlds internet p-i-m-p-s. But as to date I can’t remember receiving or seeing a porn site solely based on Flash technology. Do they even exist ? Searching for Flash + Porn on google will be like looking in a NSFW / raunchy haystack. As the flesh-entertainment industry is probably to be considered the real early adopters, are they using Flex yet ? But for Flash being used in that sector, I was really a bit afraid this would happen, and flashers would be come the production assistants (not NSFW, but if you’re at an uptight office, it is) of the online sex industry…So will WPF/e start the porn battle against Flash ? Will the battle between Apollo and WPF be settled in which desktop app will deliver the most offline enabled XXX? Yes, phun intended. Don’t take this post too serious. Feel free to comment, but keep it SFW.