WebcamRelief

[ Link ] I decided to play around with webcam feeds and 2.5D in Flash Player 10. Requires a webcam

Webcam motion detection coolness

A few weeks ago I had to create an innovative way to scroll in a page. I have seen tons of scrollbars in Flash and I found it hard to create something completely new. At one point I wondered if I could wire the scrollbar to a webcam using Actionscript… So I started experimenting around…

When I first started I quickly ran into a problem: How the hell do I know if anything is moving? So I actually got stuck right in the beginning.
I went on a Google trip which led me to Koen’s post about motion detection. Koen was checking all the pixels (using nested loops) to calculate color values. I figured this generated way too much overhead. There had to be a better/simpeler way.

In his post Koen mentioned an article, written by Guy Watson, concerning an other way to get motion detection going. To make things simple: Guy just takes 2 pictures – one of the previous frame, one of the current – puts them on top of eachother, and applies the difference blend mode to the upper one: Tadaaa! There we go! The ‘unchanged’ pixels are blacked out. The remaining pixels are the difference in the picture… which reflects movement. Read the rest of this entry »

The ‘this-is-so-cool-that-I-just-had-to-share-this-with-you’-post

Or short for ‘4 Flash experiments you must have seen‘.

Normally I’m completely against all those posts listing a bunch of items that somehow relate to each other in some way, but I’ve seen a few pretty amazing things lately that I just had to share with you.

Fun with Fur

Andre Michelle posted an experiment of his a couple of weeks ago about generating fur in Flash. The results look pretty amazing. Looks like the pictures came right out of Photoshop. However he didn’t post his SWF, nor his code. So there’s no way I could use the effect on my own images. Mark Knol however did post his SWF. In fact he built a fur generator that will enable you to link to your own picture, choose the correct settings for the engine to customize the furriness to your liking and then let it render your furry picture (which you can download afterwards). Isn’t that cool? Make sure to check both of them out.

Andre Michelle’s blogpost: Click
Andre Michelle’s Flickr Fur Collection: Click
Mark Knol’s fur engine: Click
Mark Knol’s blogpost: Click
Mark Knol’s Flick Fur pictures: Click

Read the rest of this entry »