Anyway, the point: This is Preso! It’s kind of an Adobe Connect clone, built with Flex 4 and Red5. It allows you to have a presentation online.
You start a room, upload some images (that go with your presentation), start the webcam/audio stream and share the direct link with your friends or your audience and go! Here’s a little demo that should give you an idea.

Feel free to check it out! Let me know what you think of it!

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.

So I went back to Flash and put something similar together. All I had to do now was clean up the image, turn the difference remainings white, and detect what in the picture remains white.

That last part turned out to be quite tricky too. When I first got to that milestone I quickly checked the BitmapData class for intresting methods, but I didn’t find anything intresting. Later on, I talked to Peter Elst and Koen at Flex Camp, and they told me to look again because there actually was a function: getColorBoundsRect()

There we go: that’s a solution right there! And it worked out just fine!
You can test it for yourself in this little test application – requires a webcam (duh!)

Download

Flex Project source: source.zip
Webcam motion detector class (Actionscript 3): MotionDetector.zip

I was planning on adding a ‘sensitivity’ property for motion detection but that turned out to be a bit harder. So I decided to postpone that for now (procrastination is a bitch )
Feel free to suggest better ways of doing this. I’m still pretty sure I’m creating a bit too much overhead to make this work

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

Generated Landscape

Kris Temmerman. Don’t know that name yet? Well you should. Let me show you why.
Allright, take a look at the following picture.

Looks like an ordinary 3D landscape, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t! In fact it’s the result of some smart math and a perlin noise bitmap. There is no 3D involved. No Papervision3D. No collada model. Just plain old 2D generated perlin noise. Ok, this might look pretty cool already. Kris took it one step further though… What if you generate this kind of landcape on the fly, and move it?

View the Flash version of the image: Click
Read all about it on Kris’ blog: Click

Flash game in 23 lines

Ok, this is kinda insane. Keith Peters brought back life to the 25 lines contest, as I posted earlier(Dutch). Only a few days ago the winners of November-December were announced. The winner – Marius Heil – made a platform game in ASCII using a custom copy-paste engine. That sounds like impossible to do in 25 lines. Marius however managed to to it in 23 lines. Come on, that’s insane. Congrats, Marius
The code he used was a real kick in the teeth for probably every best practice rule out there, but the result is pretty amazing. I urge you to check this out.
Note: I love how you can cheat the game. Awesome!

Play SmileyBounce 25: Click
View the code: Click

Augmented reality

That’s sounds familiar… Makes me think of artificial intelligence or something… Right? No.
This is pretty freaking cool amazing. The people over at Boffswana have been playing with the same things that Mario Klingemann showed at <head>. In his presentation, Mario held up a paper with a square on it. Flash would show the webcame stream, look for that square on that paper and add a logo right onto it in the right perspective using a bit of Papervision3D.
That sounds cool to you? Check this out: The people over at Boffswanna added another dimension to this (literally), and made an actual (animated) 3D model appear on the screen. I could explain all this, but what the heck: Just check it out for yourself.
This definitely made it to a 9.5/10 on my ‘blow-my-mind-o-meter’.

View the demo: Click
Read everything on their site, and play with it yourself: Click

So that’s it. If none of this made your jaw drop to the floor, I’d love to see your portfolio and experiments right away.

Feel free to link to other cool projects in the comments