Tag: flash

flash

Painting with physics – Kinetic Sketch

No commentJun 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized by epredator

AnnieOK just tweeted a link to this kinetic sketch web application. Its a Flash based application that the brushes are objects that are responding to one another and acting as physical simulations. i.e. a round brush rolls and square one will tip from its corner. In addition to simple physics like gravity there are lots of creativity settings for the trails that are left behind. You can even use live video (though on my Mac I had to tell flash to use the USB video class (a right click on the background and quick menu select in settings to sort that out) in order to get me as a brush. You can then post to multiple places such as I did here with going straight to Flickr (so its suitably social media aware as to be useful too 🙂 )

I still find the most basic of physics simulations interesting, as they used to be the things I wrote with my first computer (a ZX81) intertia, collisions and gravity even just in 2D have an organic feel to them. This though takes that even further with the painting aspects leaving a digital echo of the physical movements. Wonderful stuff IMHO.

I did a little extra with it that was not camera based.

It started to remind me of the recent Tate Modern show on the futurists that I went too.

It is interesting what those talented and revolutionary artists may have done back in 1911 with the technology we have today.

It also reminded me I had not blogged about the wonderful sculpture that I did not get a photo or postcard of by Umberto Boccioni (who also did the running man above) entitled “Development of a bottle in space”

This was a very striking piece but also one that looked more like prim twisting in Second Life than anything else I had seen.

Today I dived back into Metaplace and I have to say I am now very excited by its potential. I realized I had a stack of invites still so I twittered about it as one does.

So why now? Well I am busy looking at all sorts of platforms and anything that lets people just get on and do things, whilst sharing with others works for me.

Some key points.

1. My avatar can have green hair (Something PS3 home and Xbox Live still don’t do for some reason). i.e. flexible to what I personally want to do. It sounds minor but it really is important.

2. The car there as an isometric 3d object that can be rotated through 4 angles has come from Google Warehouse.

3. The image of epredator’s workplace is from my Keynote as the ACE conference. Its imported from my machine (as a jpg but its powerpoint/keynote in world)

4. You cant see the alien creature I added from the metaplace store. It is a 3d alien, but I clicked the properties to add movement code to it, and selected it should avoid me as a player. So it ran away. Scripts and code…. tick.

5. I was able to create my own space, in this case a feeding edge room. (group space and branding now playing a part)

So with imports, code to make things happen, all running in flash, backed up by a linked social network its letting people just get on and build. Always a design feature but its working really well.