The paperCrane’s view from the reverseFold

I’ve continued adding bits to my fractal letters over the past few weeks and have finally finished everything to print out my full e-mail address. The @ symbol was particularly interesting and I think it turned out pretty nice.

Fractal Email - first iteration

Fractal Email - third iteration

Fractal Email - fifth iteration

The pictures link to the updated app. Enjoy, and as usual, don’t slide the slider up to the max unless you’re willing to wait while your entire browser hangs for several minutes.

On the way home last Thursday I decided to try creating fractal letters. The idea was to replace each “line” in a simple version of a letter with a copy of itself but allow for the aspect ratio of its dimensions to change so that the result is still recognizable as a letter. This is something like an L-system, of which the Dragon curve is one. After a weekend’s worth of work I have what amounts to thirteen different fractal letter algorithms for six different letters. 1 P, 3 A, 2 E, 2 R, 2 C, 3 N. Yes, those spell PAPERCRANE. Here is the first iteration (just the letters).

Fractal Letters, iteration 1

And here is the fifth iteration:

Fractal Letters, iteration 5

Some letters have variations in how they are drawn or how they repeat, or both (hence the 2 lines). The bottom N uses an algorithm I worked out which didn’t change the aspect ratio and had only one repetition per line. Both of the N variants in the words use two repetitions per line and constrict the width faster than the height, which leaves the N recognizable. The idea here, after all, was to make letters which had a cool fractal look but could still be read.

Click either of the pictures to view the flex app and play with the iterations yourself. Just drag (or click on) the slider on the bottom of the app to change the iteration.

Stay tuned, I have another blog post coming up soon specifically about that N on the bottom, the math required to create the algorithm, and some interesting (and beautiful) results I got when implementing a test program.

I had a new idea last night on my way home for a simple use of Flash 10′s 3D to do a simple visualization. Imagine that you are looking down at the ground from high up. Suddenly the screen falls away and starts falling to the ground. Then the ground you were looking at falls away and you rezlize that it was only a screen. Repeat.

This screenshot shows the app running with a flickr satellite photo feed displaying on each falling plane. Unfortunately, since my code uses BitmapData.draw(), this won’t work from the web as I don’t want to run a flickr proxy. The linked version simply colors the planes, but you can get the idea from it. Right click the movie to view its code. If you run it locally with USE_FLICKR = true you can see the full effect.

I’ve just come home from Flash(10)Camp and am winding down. I had a lot of fun, saw some coll stuff, and even won Best Audio (with my team) with our app Flash Tones.

I was actually very surprised, there were a lot of well done apps, including others that generated sound but I guess we just had the app polished well enough. Thanks to Rod for that, he gave us the last few bits that really made it look nice. You’ll need Flash Player 10 and a web cam if you want to try it out.

All of the features I saw in Flash Player 10 were ones I’d seen before, except for the sound generation. Things were more in depth and better put together this time, though. The sound generation is nice, but complicated and hard to make it do what you’re expecting. Of course, I’m assuming you know almost nothing about the specifics of sound, like I do.

IK is fun, but I I focused on the other 2 as I didn’t have any IK idea that seemed particularly interesting.

The 3D is very nice, being able to move and rotate objects in all three dimensions opens up a lot of new possibilities. I had a lot of fun creating some simple squares and rotating them, then applying various blend modes and filters. Here are 2 of my favorites:

Those were fun but then someone mentioned webcams. I successfully connected up webcam video to my project and then spent several hours getting the video mapped to each of the rotating squares then getting it all matched up with the video behind it. I then added edge detection (thanks to Luke Walsh’s post), added some more blending and filters and voila!

I was quite proud of that and still think it looks cool. I wish I’d shown it earlier at the Hackathon but then again we won an award so I guess I’m just being greedy.

As an added bonus, here’s an earlier version of Flash Tones which warbled in an interesting way. Try putting your hand up at the very right edge of the screen.