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Davidw's Journal

Subject:The New New Media

Club:David Witt's Flash+Multimedia Club

Date:Mar 05, 2007 00:16

Visible to:Public - Everyone

Like many of you, I experience multimedia as both a creator and consumer--my wife (who's fortunately a geek like me) spend a lot of time working on our home media center and home automation, and integrating all of our devices into a network. It's tough work, and requires lots of debugging, just like multimedia dev. Things that seemingly should be easy arent, and it turns out to be more of a process than a one-time payment to the cable guy to 'hook everything up.'

I added a Mac mini a couple of weeks ago, and have been been busy tweaking it ever since. It's hooked up to our TV with an HDMI correction, and it can be run 'headless' by using a VNC client on my Macbook via our wifi network. iTunes is the main app we run on it, which is hooked up to and external 250g hard drive storing our iTunes Library, and is connected to our Home Theater as well as streaming to a remote Airport Express network for the rest of the house.

This work is different than my day job, but it is more of an extension, and it allows me to experience multimedia in different ways (not all of them as pleasant or as easy as I would like). Mostly, it is continually a work in progress, as technical limitations are always being pushed, and workarounds devised. It's important work, because your experience is always directly affected by the physical setup of your media system, and because these systems are the wave of the future that guarantees our future media experiences will be much more involved than a desk a chair and a PC!

On the work side, last week I created Antenna iPod audio tours for the Picasso in America and Brice Marden retrospective at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The tour programming was done in museum mode, which is basically a way of creating a set of menus and content links and then using a preference file to lock the menu, and disallow access to any other iPod menu settings. It's basically a limited markup language like xml saved into the Extras folder on the iPod. Nothing fancy, but interesting. It's another facet of how the Apple consumer experience is shaping the nature of how multimedia is consumed, and how this impacts the future.

So my question to you all is, when you think about creating multimedia, do you ever think about media other than the web? What do you think would be different if your work was deployed on, say, an iPod or a PDA? It's coming, so let's hear what you think!

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Davidw's Journal Message Board

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Forum: The New New Media

jeremyw75

Posted on: 03-05-07 02:25 AM

center parcs

As you may or may not know I got a job in London in a great digital media company last year. I was the third member of the flash team and as the company has grown with the explosion of online spending so the company has needed to split into 3 hubs (basically 3 mini agencies) leaving me as the flash guy for my hub (for flash read multimedia). One of our clients in my hub is going to be center parcs and they have already signed on for a significant spend for 2007. The challenge is going to be to meet their demands for interactive content. They are a very experimental client and are already interested in such areas as interactive tours and treasure hunts for the kids. My mind is awash with various ways to implement innovative multimedia experiences. But any ideas you may have (group) would be greatly appreciated. This is all going to be new for me as I have yet to design anything for digital offline. I did see a great flash based digital installation over at the Natural History museum where the work is projected onto a surface that kids can interact with using their fingers. They could select different tools to 'digitally' dig various dinosaur sites. The system had various booths around the exhibit and the interface would scan your card and recognize who you were. There was even an online aspect to it so that when you got home you could print out a certificate. Check it out here

overtime

Posted on: 04-06-07 11:05 AM

Interested in More flash interactives.
Very interested to here that the push is for more flash interactives, I am not versed in the coding or protocols involved in making Flash extensible, to pda's or ipods or to cell phones for that matter. I imagine that will be tackled and designed for as circumstance dictates. But I do see a huge area of evolving in the area of interactives. Historical slide-throughs, games for children (as jeremy mentioned), and science demonstrations. I am working on something right now that is volunteer based.

But the opportunity is great. It deals with cymatics ( http://www.cymaticsource.com/ ) the study of sound reverberations, A really fascinating topic, so I volunteered. I see Flash aps as an incredible good way to promote visual learning and, in this case I will hopefully have some audio and image interactions, some synestesia. So sort of pitching that to consumers as a viable option for there content displays. I am also wondering if anyone here knows of a good market, or a good way to market flash games. I have a few little things kicking in the works and it would good to know if there are some decent, integrated markets for internet gaming.
Thanks I would love to hear some responses to this.

Paul Vdst

davidw

Posted on: 03-31-07 01:19 PM

hi Jeremy-

That's great news! I'm glad you're getting a chance to work with a client who is interested and willing to push the boundaries, and that you're breaking out of the box, and designing content for environments outside of the web--it's more challenging, but also a lot more fun!

You are in the middle of a process of expanding your mindset as to what can be done, and also your skills to make it happen--your Natual History museum experience is a good way to go about this, and if I may humbly suggest, a trip to the Tate Modern to check out the Antenna Audio multimedia tour could also help trigger some ideas--especially, the kids tour, which has some fun and interesting multimedia games (which I programmed, btw)

Also, check out the current 'Holy Grail' of environmental multimedia, the shiny and new Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart...Maybe you could wrangle a trip to visit there;>

davidw

Posted on: 04-10-07 12:00 PM

hi Paul-

Your original point is well made--specific platforms, devices, and also specific Flash functionality is all best learned on a project basis, where you dive in and learn about something based on a specific project need.

Don't feel badly about doing 'volunteer' work--the best projects tend to be the ones that pay the least! In fact, I think this is a sort of litmus test--people who are all about getting paid are not the best in their field, because they lack the passion and desire to create without monetary compensation. We all have to eat and pay bills, however, the reality of design work is that a lot of it is unpaid or low-paying, whether it's working on your own projects, or building a portfolio;>

Cymatics is a fascinating area of work--it is tied in to many universal physical and artistic principles, and as such, it can be modeled in Flash animations, and Flash can also be used as the platform for creating interactive multimedia regarding the subject of cymatics. In other words, you can create the thing itself, as well as design the commentary and information around it!

Regarding sound, interactivity and Flash, if you haven't seen it already, you need to know about FlashAmp--this Flash plugin reads amplitude values from a sound input source, allowing you to create reactive Flash animations. Adobe/MM have built this functionality into Flash, with the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() method

While I haven't had a chance to play with this yet, I did do several projects using the original FlashAmp plugin, and it is fairly easy to use, and offers a world of potential effects and uses--there is a demo version, iirc, so give it a look!

Finally, regarding your Flash games question, i'm not in the game market, however, I see a lot of Flash game links posted on Digg, so my advice would be to start reading Digg, and then follow these links as they pop up, and they should lead you to learn more about the many ways that Flash games are marketed to the public;>

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