REDBLIND

Inspired by the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake I created this little prototype. I pull down the earthquake RSS feed from the USGS and parse the data for the longitude, latitude, magnitude and date/time of recent earthquakes. I then plot them in sequence on a Papervision3D sphere textured with an image from NASA’s Visible Earth. The quakes play to scale in time that they occurred. Each quake is assigned a musical note according to the magnitude. The higher the magnitude the lower the note. Currently I am pulling quakes with at least a 2.5M for that last 24 hours.

For plotting points, I used this blog post as a reference. The musical notes I exported from Garage Band. Also of note, the USGS does not have a cross domain policy set up for Flash, so I had to proxy the RSS feed with a PHP script. I will probably be adding more features, refining the musicality and adding a UI to this, so check back again sometime.

Click screenshot below to launch it.

UPDATE: Looks like the USGS not only moved their feed, but changed it a bit. For now, this won’t work.

Looks like my fellow McCannite devs in Belgium beat us too it. If you want to try it out, download the QR code, then hit this page to launch the application. Good job guys.

Today I spent some time playing with FLARToolKit, an AS3 port of the C based ARToolKit. If you have a webcam, launch the application, download and print this QR code PDF and place in front of your camera.

Flash AR Test from redblind on Vimeo.

I will post source once I clean it up.

Just messing with Pixel3D in Papervision3D. 2000 particles randomly positioned in a virtual sphere that tween to another random position on the virtual sphere. No sphere primitive used. Just Pixels and Pixel3D.

 Testing out mapping a panoramic image to the inside of a cylinder.

Source available here.

Panoramic image by the amazing artist Mario Doucet at dusso.com.

Got an idea from watching the end credits of Iron Man to create an exploding diagram using papervision3D. This is the result. Pretty simple. Just some MovieClips on transparent planes. Tweening the rotaion and Z properties randomly using TweenLite. Could easily be done in Flash 10 without PV3D.

I put together some Papervision3D examples to go through for our weekly developer meeting.  They demonstrate some simple approaches you can take with Papervisio3D. Thought I’d post them up here, also.  Source available at the bottom.

Example 1: Interactive Plane
Demonstrates the use of interactive MovieClipMaterial. When you click the plane the number increments.

Example 2: Nested DisplayObject3Ds
Demonstrates nesting DisplayObject3Ds inside other DisplayObject3Ds. This example nests a Sphere in a Plane in order to easily orbit a Sphere around another Sphere.

Example 3: Extending DisplayObject3D with Custom Classes
Demonstrates extending DisplayObject3D or other primitives to easily manage position and code.

Example 4: Collada
Demonstrates the use of Collada DAE exports from 3D modeling software and adding video to a UV map.  Source for this example will not be provided.

Download Source Here