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.

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.

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 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.