Jun 23, 2009

I just stumbled upon this very short TED talk by Chris Hughes. In his presentation Chris Hughes shows of an "Augmented Reality demo using Adobe Flash!". In an exited tone he talks about how he wrote a piece of software (!) to allow the replacement of a "2D Barcode" with something "really, really cool" using nothing but Adobe Flash!
In reality he hardly wrote any software, rather did he do a pretty standard and in my opinion a very ugly implementation of Papervision3D and FLARToolkit, for which tutorials can be found online quite easily.
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May 22, 2009

Before I start, I want to explain the timeline which led to this blog post. This was supposed to become a post of being able to get much faster access to bytearray's through ActionScript, by (ab)using the Alchemy memory opcodes. I spent quite some time trying to build a swc library which would allow you to do just that. Only to learn that you can't build a generalized API for this in ActionScript. It just can't work out with the current ActionScript compiler technology; here's the story of why.
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Apr 6, 2009

After the overwhelming response of posting the sources of 300.000 pixels with Alchemy and Pixelbender, I thought it would be nice to post some more from my session at FITC Amsterdam.
First let's take a look at what people have done in response of the previous sources.
Yonatan Offek - Sierpinski Particles
Peter Nitsch - Alchemy Particles
David Lenaerts - Smoke, Milk and Ink
Dennis Ippel - Incredibly fast Plasma
Joa Ebert - Massive amounts of 3D particles without Alchemy and Pixelbender
All the work in that list is incredible, but for this post, I'm most interested in the last 2. Joa's work on getting AS3 up to speed with my Alchemy demo (Joa's demo is actually faster then the Alchemy version on my machine) is incredible. And it also proves the one thing I tried to convey in my blog post Adobe Alchemy, is it ActionScript Heresy ?.
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