Designing Interaction with Electronics

Next week I will be teaching part of the Designing Interaction with Electronics course at Media Lab Helsinki, 8-10/September.

A description of the course:

The course provides a journey of design process from developing concepts to prototyping interactions. During the course, an intensive workshop is held for a week to learn how to build prototypes using software programming and electronic assembling. The rest of the course is organized by 2 hours weekly workshops and lectures. After a theme is given, students will work on developing concepts within groups and planning for prototypes. Actual prototyping experience consists of two phases. The students will be asked to present their work in progress after the first phase. Feedback from guests and other audiences should be applied to the second. The final prototypes will be presented in the Xmas demoday in Media Lab.

Prototyping environment – Arduino, Adobe Flash and Nokia N900

The course will be coordinated by Michihito Mizutani, I will teach the Flash component of the course.

More information at the Media Lab website:
http://mlab.taik.fi/studies/courses/course?id=1808
and Michihito’s Paja blog:
http://mlab.taik.fi/paja/?p=1249

Program and resources for Wednesday 7/9 and Thursday 8/9:

Wednesday 8/9 – Adobe Flash/ActionScript
Basic concepts and managing information flow. Display objects and events.

Morning
textfield [tutorial and files]
variables [tutorial and files]
functions [tutorial and files]
arrays and loops [tutorial and files]

Afternoon
buttons [tutorial and files]
conditionals and properties [tutorial and files]
continuous events [tutorial and files]

Thursday 9/9 – Adobe Flash/ActionScript
Drawing by code, components and creating classes. Loading external elements.

Morning
vector drawing [tutorial and files]
generating random numbers [tutorial and files]
class creation [tutorial and files]
components [tutorial by Adobe]

Afternoon
loading images [tutorial and files]
loading text [tutorial and files]
xml [tutorial and files]

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Multimedia Development – new online materials for learning Flash and ActionScript


In August, I developed 3 “learning objects” related to Flash and ActionScript, entitled “Multimedia Development”:
http://multimediadev.wordpress.com/

This is similar to an online course (although allowing for self-exploration), and somehow adapts some of the lessons I’ve been teaching in my latest Flash-related courses. It has been commissioned by Tallinn University. Check it out if you want to learn Flash/ActionScript 3, or if you are just curious. Feedback is welcome.

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Eaze Tween – Flash AS3 tweening library

Eaze Tween is a “smart, fast, chainable and compact Flash AS3 tweening library”.

Link to the library:
http://code.google.com/p/eaze-tween/

Link to a post about Eaze at the developer’s blog:
http://philippe.elsass.me/2009/11/as3-eaze-tween-library-update/

A project built with Eaze and TUIO:
http://techsparked.com/application/as3-tuio-hypeeaze-particles

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Beyond HTML5: experiments with interactive audio

The combination of HTML5, JavaScript and the evolution of browsers will allow for audio manipulation and visualization similar to what can today be achieved with Flash.

David Humphrey has been experimenting on top of Mozilla’s extensible platform. His explorations can be found at the Mozilla Hacks Blog:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/beyond-html5-experiments-with-interactive-audio/

More on David’s experiments with audio:
http://vocamus.net/dave/?cat=25

Other articles mentioning this:
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/05/new-html5-tools-make-your-browser-sing-and-dance/
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/05/03/real-sound-synthesis-now-an-open-standard-in-the-browser/
http://createdigitalmotion.com/2010/05/3d-sound-now-in-the-browser-and-processing-js/

One example, quoted from Mozilla Hacks: “(…) done by Jacob Seidelin, and shows many cool 2D visualizations of audio using our API. You can see the live version on his site, or check out the video above.”

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Google Chrome browser integrates Flash plug-in

Interesting news on the Adobe vs Apple vs Google saga: Google Chrome browser now integrates Flash plug-in:
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/03/dev-channel-update_30.html

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Coordinate Tracker


http://mlab.taik.fi/mediacode/coursefiles/course_2010_01/projects/sara_jacobsen/coordinates.swf

This exercise is part of an environmental management project I am building for DVD seminar.

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Project posts – links and recommendations

To the Multimedia Authoring course participants:

Again, thanks for your enthusiasm and great projects!

As you can see in the previous post, I’ve uploaded documentation videos to Vimeo, and photos to Flickr. I’ve also uploaded screenshots of your projects, to the respective project folders.

What I’d like from each of you:

Continue reading

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Course ended / projects / documentation

The Multimedia Authoring Course (2010) has ended. Thank you to all participants.

The projects can be found in this link (source code included):
http://mlab.taik.fi/mediacode/coursefiles/course_2010_01/projects/

Videos of the project presentations can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nunocorreia/sets/72157629693724784/

And photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nunocorreia/sets/72157623249650673/

IMG_2325 IMG_2329 IMG_2335 IMG_2338 IMG_2342 IMG_2345 IMG_2347 IMG_2353 IMG_2354 IMG_2356 IMG_2358 IMG_2363 IMG_2364 IMG_2374 IMG_2377 IMG_2381 IMG_2383 IMG_2385 IMG_2391 IMG_2394 IMG_2403 IMG_2401
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Flint Particle System

This is a good resource for particle emitter libraries. They also supply good documentation, examples and a useful tutorial that covers the basics.

http://flintparticles.org/

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“Throw” tutorial with physics behavior

From gotoAndLearn.com: a video tutorial for creating a “throwable” slider, with physics behavior (source file available):

http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=81

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