Author Archives: Nate Frank

Nate is currently a Senior Presentation Layer Architect at Razorfish Chicago. As an SPLA Nate: participates in technology leadership team and resource allocations, manage fulltime and contractor resources, represents technology for groups of brands across multiple clients, furthers development of standards within the office, architects project implementations and fosters community and mentoring.

As video games become even more mainstream in entertainment with applications like steam making it almost instant to engage many find that games are pushing the movie metaphor. It used to be some games were based on movies, then more movies based on games, now we find so many games playing like interactive movies (mass effect is a solid example). Also it seems they’ve used the voice of some prominent actors (nothing new, the Command and Conquer franchise has been using familiar movie actors in cut scenes of their game for several iterations). One such game is the latest release to the Deus EX franchise; Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

We ran into an issue where in internet explorer 7 and internet explorer 8, that on pages that contained flash and had PNGs that we used as background images for divs. Instead of being a consistent repeat of the transparent color there was an odd linear gradient or radial gradient from the color in the PNG; located in the upper left corner of the element to completely transparent the further the distance from the top left corner.

On pages where flash was not initially loaded, but then is written to the page later after page load the PNGs appeared correctly at first, but as soon as a flash element is loaded the same issue presents itself.

There’s a solution on this forum.

He presents that the problem is only when the background image is over flash, but from what I’ve seen it also happens when the SWF is over the content.

The solution worked with flash player 10.0 and no special wmodes.

Working with basic Kinect in flash is as easy as working with TUIO in flash. We’ve written a few things to get people started with TUIO and they all apply here.

Before you know it you’ll be making fun things like this:

After you’ve gotten started with TUIO, you’ll need a different application for grabbing/transforming the data from a Kinect into TUIO data that can be consumed by your application.

Today Adobe announced that flash player 11 is available on labs for beta download. It’s been in incubator release for a while.

We’ve been working with it for a while looking to tap into the GPU acceleration. We’ve found some interesting points so far; limitations, capabilities, hardware issues.

Need a once stop shop for getting started with TUIO and flash? There’s lots of tutorials out there, but we have a summary of the breadth of content in its relation to flash.

• TUIO and flash quick start guide

  Everything one needs to get up and started developing a TUIO application.

• TUIO Overview

  What is TUIO? Here’s a brief and more detailed overview.

• Getting data from the TUIO tracker into flash

  There are several ways to get TUIO data into flash, here’s a breakdown of them.

• TUIO flash libraries

  There’s a couple TUIO AS3 libraries of note, we look at their benefits.

• Bubblebird TUIO AS3 library and gestures

  This library has lots of great methods for creating gestures, but there’s some gotchas. See what they are.

• A simple TUIO application

  Coming soon.

• More complex applications

  Coming soon.

Congratulations, either you have an in depth knowledge of TUIO, or you’ve decided to jump right in.

Here’s a high level breakdown to get up and running as fast as possible.

While the bubble bird library is a great implementation of TUIO protocol the gesture system currently has a few gotchas.

There are two mainstream AS3 libraries for interpreting TUIO protocol data and making use of it within flash. Here’s a look at some of their details.

Flash can connect to TUIO data services in one of three ways; TCP, UDP, LocalConnection. Here’s a breakdown of those methods.

TUIO at its core.

In the most simple definition, TUIO is a way of sending a representation of touch points between two applications.