World360: Unbugged and kicking!

A few days back, I posted the latest update on my World360 project (aka ‘stereographic projection‘… That’s what it is actually called). What this thing actually does is it turns a 360° panorama image into a stereographic projection. The idea is to render this real time (just for the fun of doing it) (I am thinking about doing more with this though…)

A few days back I ran into a (at that time) weird problem where transparency was rendered black after a few frames. I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and I just didn’t have a clue where to start looking. Google wasn’t really helping me out either. So I posted my problem on FlashFocus but nobody came up with the answer to my problem. Peter Elst asked Ralph Hauwert if he already had run into this problem. Mario Klingemann suggested that there might be a problem with the premultiplied alpha. At that time I didn’t know what premultiplied alpha was and seen as the problem resembled the example Mario gave, it seemed quite obvious he was right.

So I took peace with this, and decided to fall back to a non-transparent image format like JPEG. 2 days later Erwin Verdonk came up with the answer to the whole problem… I just had a hard time understanding it…

The root of the problem was me: I had totally forgotten that the draw() method of the BitmapData class didn’t clear the pixels before drawing… Yea, that’s emberassing, right?

But okay… That took care of some problems. I rewrote some of the code, and adjusted some settings.
The speed and the result are quite okay right now. However using 450MB and up of RAM usage might be a bit of a killer.
I’m wondering if I could take care of this using PNGencoder or perhaps JPGencoder.

But for now I’m happy… The final result (for now) can be seen here.

Thanks everybody for helping me out. You guys rock!

PS: The picture used in this experiment was taken by Thomas Heylen. Thanks Thomas!

My FITC schedule

I’m attending FITC 09 in Amsterdam next monday. I thought it’d be good to start the day by making up my schedule for the conference.

Monday

• Keynote
• Aral Balkan – The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades
• Ralph Hauwert - Professionally Pushing Pixels (with Flash 10)
• Niko Stumpo – Unique Experiences
• Seb Lee-Delisle – Papervision3D, simplified
• Joshua Davis - New Works

Tuesday

• André Michelle – Boing Bumm Tschak!
• Keith Peters – Art from code
• Mario Klingemann – The Tinkerer’s box
• Jared Ficklin – Seeing sound
• James Eberhardt – Introduction to iPhone SDK for Flash Developers
• David Carson – The rules of graphic design

I really must admit, there were some hard choices… The FITC schedule is packed with intresting topics… I wonder if they’ll record the sessions and release them to the public afterwards.
If you happen to be going to one/some of the same sessions: feel free to let me know in the comments. I’d love to meet up!

World360 update, now with PNG bug!

Yesterday I decided to get back to my so called ‘World360′ experiment. I wanted to speed up the pre-rendering engine. I managed to do that, with some amazing results: Up to 3 times faster overall. Peaks of 800% speed gain!

You can view the previous version here.
The latest version can be viewed here.

I’m very happy with that, but there’s one little problem. I started to notice a very ugly black border around redrawn PNG transparency (which happens when the animation is pre-renderd).

Result without redrawing bitmap (aka: real time rendering)

Result when redrawing the bitmap (aka pre-rendering)

Read the rest of this entry »

Design. Technology. Cool shit.

The well-known slogan of FITC!

After having held successful events at Toronto, Chicago, Winnipeg, and Hollywood, last year FITC came to Amsterdam. I don’t have to tell you that Amsterdam was at least as successful as the other events. And in a little less than 2 weeks, FITC Amsterdam will kick off for the second time!

Only a few days ago FITC announced that the Amsterdam event was already sold out. Again. And I’m one of the lucky ones to go!
Also, no different than last year, Adobe Max Award winner Thomas Joos created an event guide for your mobile phone. Make sure you check it out!

I’ll be attending FITC for the first time, so I’m very excited.
I’ll be there with Jeroen Beckers, my FlashFocus colleage. If you’re there make sure to come by. I’d love to meet you guys (and gals)!

Soooo… Who’s coming?