Hiya,

This is just a quick post to let you know that I am still around and active, I have just been rather busy with exams and other things to post, but I promise I’ll have something new up in the next week!

Sorry for the inactivity. :/

H.

You may have noticed that I have just updated my homepage with a little sign up feature that lets you enter your e-mail address and I’ll let you know when my portfolio is ready. *Don’t worry, these address will be destroyed after the notification has been sent and will not be sold or abused in anyway!* .

You can view the new page here: http://www.harrynorthover.com/, so head over there and stick your e-mail address in and i’ll let you know when my sites *finally* ready!

Harry.

This is just a quick note to say that I have just found out that my first tutorial over at The Tech Labs has gone live! It is entitled ‘Create and Skin a Photo Gallery with Flickr, Flex and Actionscript 3.0′ It can be found here:

http://www.thetechlabs.com/tutorials/flex/create-and-skin-a-photo-gallery-with-flickr-flex-and-actionscript-30/

You can follow The Tech Labs over at twitter here: @thetechlabs. Make sure you spread the word around about the tutorial!

If you have been following me on Twitter, then you may have noticed that I have been getting into Augmented Reality. This is the coolest thing I have seen in a long time! Now if you don’t know what this is, then it is a means of mapping 3D objects to a marker in the real world through a web cam.

Here is a simple guide to getting setup using the Augmented Reality in Flash. This includes downloading the library’s and then getting a simple demo up and running.

The name of the library used for Augmented Reality in Flash is called FLARToolkit which is developed by Saqoosha. It is a port of the ARToolkit which is written in C. You can download it from here through SVN. If you haven’t got a SVN client setup then I highly recommend SmartSVN which is a free client and I must thank Richard Leggett for recommending this to me!

Now once you have got the code, add it to your global Actionscript folder, then print out this marker and run the example. You can either compile the source in the ’src’ folder or just run the SWF in the ‘bin-debug’ folder. Hopefully this gives you a idea of what AR/FLARToolkit is all about.

If you can run the example yourself, here is a video of it in action.

FLARToolkit / Augmented Reality Basic Demo. from Harry Northover on Vimeo.

I have also written a base class for a FLARToolkit application. It is designed so that all you have to do is override the function ‘add3d()‘ to add your 3D objects to ‘FLAR_Container” object, and then override another function, ‘addAnimation_3d()‘ to add the animation. My description here is very brief so read the readme file in the package. You can download the class here. If you want to see how much code this can reduce then here is an example class using the base class:

package
{
	import com.harrynorthover.ar.flar.base.FLARSingleMBase;
 
	import flash.filters.BlurFilter;
 
	import org.papervision3d.lights.PointLight3D;
	import org.papervision3d.materials.shadematerials.FlatShadeMaterial;
	import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.MaterialsList;
	import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Cube;
 
	[SWF(width="640", height="480", frameRate="30", backgroundColor="#FFFFFF")]
 
	public class Demo_BaseClass_Test extends FLARSingleMBase
	{
		private var cube:Cube;
 
		public function Demo_BaseClass_Test()
		{
			/*This is the function 'Init' you need to call to setup the FLARToolkit scene.
			     WIDTH, HEIGHT, FRAMERATE*/
			Init(640,   480,    30);
		}
 
		/*
		...
		This function is the one you need to override
		to add things to your 3D scene.
		*/
 
		override protected function add3D():void
		{
			// Add you 3D stuff here. The more the better :-)
			var pl:PointLight3D = new PointLight3D();
			pl.z = -1000;
			pl.y = 1000;
			pl.x = 1000;
			pl.flipped = true;	
 
			//var blurFilter:BlurFilter = new BlurFilter(24, 12, 1);
			var matList:MaterialsList = new MaterialsList();
			var fsm:FlatShadeMaterial = new FlatShadeMaterial(pl);
 
			matList.addMaterial(fsm, "all");
 
  			cube = new Cube(matList, 60, 60, 60, 5, 5, 5);
  			//cube.useOwnContainer = true;
  			//cube.filters = [blurFilter];
 
  			// FLAR_Container is the FLARBaseNode that you
  			// add your 3D objects to.
	        FLAR_Container.addChild(cube);
		}
 
		/*
		...
		This is the function to which you override to add
		your 3D animation.
		*/
 
		override protected function addAnimation_3d():void
		{
			//Add you animation here.
			cube.yaw(10);
		}
	}
}

See? Lots of code that has been got rid of!

Other demos I have been working on are here:

FLAR + Lines3D:

FLARToolkit and Lines3D / Augmented Reality from Harry Northover on Vimeo.

Incorporating AS3DMod:

FLAR + As3DMod from Harry Northover on Vimeo.

So there you go, my first few demos. Yes, I know, they are not very special but now I’m working on getting mutliple markers working and just more advanced demos in general. If you are looking for more advice on how to get set up with FLAR go over to this blog here. This has everything you need to get going. Also, check out squidder.com for some cool demos.

Happy ARing!

This video was made by Tim Smit, who is a dutch student. For the video above, he did most of the work by himself. This mean filming the footage in his local village, adding in the special effects using After Effects and 3Ds Max and all with a budget of $150! The video is a test movie of his film ‘What’s In The Box’ and the official site can be found here.

I’ve heard that several Hollywood studios have been in contact with him and some are even discussing making his movie!

Some of you may have read my twitter updates about technical trouble with my PC, and I thought I would post the solution here.

After many hours trying to figure out why my computer was coming up with the error:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
 
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

I still had no solution. The Windows XP CD install just hung on ‘Searching for previous Windows XP Installations…’ and the Windows Setup recovery tool just hung as well after selecting which Windows installation I wanted it to fix.

I then had to get on to Dell support, which is never very pleasant. After running the Dell diagnostics CD, it reported the error:

"Error Code: 0F00:0650.
Msg: IDE Failed: The self-test failed the read portion"

They then sent me 2 new hard drives, which for some reason we double the size of the original :) After installing these and trying to install XP again it still didn’t work. I ran the Dell diagnostics again, it reported the same error. I was stuck.

Then I went into the BIOS settings and turned RAID control off on the 2 hard drivers. You do this by selecting the drive, and changing it status from ‘Raid on’ to ‘On’. This seemed to solved the problem. I am now thinking that it was not really necessary to get 2 now hard drives as well! It so happened that my warranty had run out 10 days earlier so I had to pay for these! >(

I know this isn’t related to the web, but seeing as I couldn’t find a solution I thought I would post it here.

You might have noticed that at the top of the page and on my homepage, I have been sporting a new logo. This was designed by be in Photoshop (surprise, surprise…) and I was just looking for feedback. Let me know what you think.

Here it is:

Oh and sorry there has been a huge lack in activity, but I can promise you there will be more to come soon :)

Harry.

Now, over the past 10 years there have been many new and exciting technologies appear which help us create and develop more advance apps. Over the past 3 – 4 years, companies and individuals have been taking a different approach on the research they have been doing. Instead of creating new technologies (languages, software, etc..) to solve a problem, they have been using existing products in different roles. The two best examples of this is Adobe Alchemy and the Microsoft Research project, Singularity. If you don’t know what either of these are them a) be ashamed ;) and b) keep reading.

Adobe Alchemy.

This is a project Adobe developed that lets you take any C/C++ library/code and use it in Actionscript. Now, if you know anything about C/C++, then you will be aware that the number of libraries and open source tools out there vastly exceeds that of Flash’s, so there is something for everyones need, and now the need to write you own is going to be almost completely redundant in the future. You may have seen some of the extreamly cool projects being developed out there, like Doom in Flash (don’t open this at work, you’ll never close it). Although this isn’t perfect, it is still quite an achievement. In time, the desktop will become the web. Going back to the original topic of this post, role reversal, who would of thought a few years ago, that the same type of code that powers the worlds most famous operating system would be able to run on the web? Now, I hope you see what I am getting at. Instead of Adobe creating a whole new language, they just took an existing language, original designed to be a low level language and made tools that let people use it in another way, which was completely unrelated to its original purpose. 

One way to look at this is that nothing new has been created here, nothing has moved forward. You could say that things have moved sideways or expanded in a different direction to what has been happening in the past few years. Using the same thing, just in a different way. 

Singularity.

Microsoft Windows is developed using a mix of Assembly, C and C++ (the well know ones all are), and anyone who has done some serious development with these languages know that it is very easy to go wrong and that you, as a developer, have to watch you back. C/C++ are unsafe languages which means there is a lot of room for error, but they are also extremely fast, so it’s the best choice for an OS. Now though, people at Microsoft Research have been developing their own OS, Singularity, which is developed using minimal Assembly and C (for the boot code, as you have no choice) and then using a modification of the C# language as their main programming language. Seeing where I’m going here? A high level language that is used as part of the .NET framework and for developing Windows Applications, is being used to write an operating system! Now, this isn’t going to replace the current version of Windows we are using now, or any time soon, as for now it is just a proof of concept. This is amazing though, as now you get all the safety of C# (well, Spec#) in an OS. This means auto garbage collection, array bounds checking, which means a lot less chance of a buffer overflow and the whole system would be so much more stable, but not as fast as the original Windows. The modification of C# they are using is called Sing# which is a superset of Spec#. The difference between Sing# and C# is that Sing# has support for channels and low-level programming language constructs that are needed for system programming.

You can read an overview of the Singularity Project here, and you can download it from CodePlex here. 

The Final Word.

Now, these two projects are the best I could think of to prove my point, which I hope you understand. The fact that no technology is limited to one purpose and that instead of creating new languages/software, there is always the option to bend an existing one to shape your needs. 5 years ago, who would of thought that this could be possible? It will be interesting to see what happens in the future….

-Harry. 

Over the past few years there have been some seriously successful and creative sites pop up. Ranging from the ones like YouTube who base themselves on a simple idea and stick to it. Others like Wordpress who started off as a simple extension to another CMS, then grew to a fully featured system with a plugin and theme database and on top of all, use by millions all over the world! Along side these sites there have been millions of sites/creations who fail trying to achive the same effect as the two previously mentioned. Now I’m not going to mention any names here, mainly because I don’t know that many and of course, it’s just not nice to say someone’s creation is a failure.

Now, this brings me to my main point, how do you come up with a killer idea?

The answer?
There is no simple one. (Annoying, I know :()

I have been thinking about this for quite a while now, and the need for even greater talent is felt more than ever.

With what seems like all the simple, brilliant ones taken, and people coming up with new ones all the time, how do you create something unique? Now the way you do this depends on what sort of service you want to create? Whether it is a way to integrate 3rd party APIs together in one easy place (e.g. linking Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress together) or if you want to create something completly different (e.g. Digg – unique back in the day, but now there are a lot of reps).

I tend not to limit myself to any one type. The way I do it is list all my different services I use, what my work flow is between them, and then I think how I could make it easier and/or simpler to do this. Or if there is anything major I wish these services had to offer, then it would be work building my own, with this feature and others included. Think Blogger to Kontain. Kontain is the same as blogger, with a lot of features added in or changed.

This is the basics of it, but you can go into a lot of detail and complexity on this, so there is really no limit to what sorta stuff you can come up with. This is my prefered way of coming up with a new idea, but it depends how you think and the way you work (visual, pratical, etc….).

I look forward to seeing all the progess that is make in the next few years and hopefully I’ll be at the front of it :D

Harry.