LAFlashapaloozastock 2, the revenge
Events, Flash, LA Flash, Miscellaneous
7/15/07
I spent Saturday in Venice at LAFlashapaloozastock 2, a combination seminar/schmoozefest/job fair put on by the wonderful folks at LA Flash. If you’re in the LA area, have any interest in Flash and haven’t hooked up with this group yet, you’re missing out on a great community.
My introduction to LA Flash came last year, when I managed to snag a presenter slot at JobStock ‘06, a networking event where local Flash talent did three-minute presentations of their work alongside presentations from studios seeking flashers. I was immediately struck by the warmth of the community and especially its openness to people with a wide range of skill sets. Flash by nature has an extremely diverse user base in terms of expertise, and it’s a great to see a community that does such a good job catering to newbies as well as to more experienced folks.
The highlights of the day for me were presentations by Sam Rivello on building a custom blitting engine in Flash, and a talk by Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash on the history of Flash character animation, including his Flash Animation 10, a survey of the most influential online Flash shorts and a welcome bit of cultural perspective.
At the end of the presentations they raffled off a Wii, an Apple TV, and a bunch of other good stuff…
...and the tacos were delicious!
[ image from ccharlton on flickr ]
My favorite Wii story
Wii
7/7/07
The Wii retains its aura of hipness, even eight months after the launch. Perhaps this is in part because the consoles themselves are still hard to find, but I suspect this continuing enthusiasm speaks beyond scarcity to address a whole host of compelling stories we’re longing to tell ourselves about high technology. Some see in the Wii the redemption of videogaming from couch-potatoism. Some see the invigoration of a industry in a creative slump. Some see the quicksilver of cool. Some see profit, some see fun. Some see a fad.
My own favorite story to tell about the Wii is the way it’s going to make possible an entirely new category of popular interactive art. I think that in the Wii a remarkable opportunity to broaden the reach of experimental interactivity has been almost literally dropped into our palms. Its celebrated controller is a brilliantly hybridized design that combines familiar and unfamiliar in a way which disrupts conventional expectations and creates a void into which the general public now expects experimentation to make consistent appearance. Not an insignificant achievement.
Nintendo is also teaching millions of people to judge interactivity qualitatively in ways they may not have considered before. It’s a short step for a Wii user to go from honing their gestures in WiiSports to thinking of themselves as a performer in a more explicitly artistic context. It’s all about the how—and what the controller does so beautifully is to decouple the how from hardcore training, which is what interactive “entertainment” feels like to many people. How no longer has to be only about adopting the hypertensive posture of the gamer in constant pursuit of decreased response time. How just got bigger.
Looking at the current crop of Wii titles, however, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the new How was an odd mix of play-acting, general goofiness and mostly failed attempts to one-up the hardcore. I enjoy many of these titles myself, but a quick search on the net reveals something of the real promise of this technology put to work in experiments which are not running on the Wii console, but through various hacks and workarounds that open its motion-sensitive capabilities to musicians, DJs, VJs, artists and others. (In fact, an entire sub-genre of online video has cropped up consisting of Wiimote-wielding geeks demonstrating their prowess in front of monitors glowing with a fresh hack—a sub-genre to which I was gratified to make my own contribution last week.)
I think it would be unfortunate if development inspired by the Wii continued to grow solely along these bifurcated paths. Most of the artists experimenting with the Wiimote are making tools for themselves or for other artists; many of the game developers are stumbling over each other trying to appeal to markets they haven’t historically been interested in. This leaves room for the contributions of those who see in the Wii something they’ve been waiting on for a long time, perhaps without even knowing it. Maybe their way, like the Wiimote itself, will be a hybrid combination of familiar and unfamiliar, old and new, common and uncommon.
I can’t wait to find out.
The impossible iPhone
Exemplary Work, iPhone
7/2/07
I’m an Apple fanboy from way back. When I was a kid my parents used to take me to the LO*OP Center, whose founder, Liza Loop, was the lucky recipient of the first Apple I directly from Woz himself. Soon after we bought an Apple II+ and…
Well, anyway, I’ve been as fascinated as anyone by the iPhone, but have managed to keep any out-and-out technolust to a minimum. Until today, that is, when I read the most in-depth review of the iPhone I’ve yet seen, from AppleInsider. It’s quite a lengthy piece, but what really caught my eye was the discussion of the user interface on page four:
This device is so full of unnecessary interface embellishments that it appears to be the work of artisan crafters working to impress the world with their witty creative wizardry rather than a corporation scheming to earn money and market share. It simply does not feel possible that the iPhone should exist, but here I am holding it in my hand.
And that’s the sweet spot. Apple’s really good at telling this particular story (and of course they are scheming to earn money and market share). It seems like the iPhone shouldn’t exist, but the fact that it does means that you, the user, were right. All those other phones you had a hard time using? Well, they were wrong, and you were right. And this object is the evidence of your rightness.
It’s not just an Apple thing, though. My favorite art, the stuff that really knocks my socks off, always seems to give me that same feeling.
Wiimote type animation: “Swing”
Animation, Experiments, Flash, Wii
6/26/07
Greetings, programs. I’m launching erikloyer.com with a first foray into Wiimote-enabled work—a type animation experiment called “Swing.” Swing lets you use the Wiimote to waggle your way through syllables of text. When the syllables are written by Kurt Elling and you put on “Tanya Jean” (Elling’s brilliant riff on Dexter Gordon) in the background, you get…
Swing is made possible by the wonder of WiiFlash, which enables Flash to receive data from up to four Wiimotes simultaneously under Windows. Unfortunately, getting your PC set up to do this is not as straightforward as one would hope. If you’re feeling adventurous, though, visit the Swing page for more info (and a mouse-enabled version of the piece for the Wiimote-challenged).
Enterprising folks may be able to find other interesting uses for Swing. Let me know what you discover—feature requests are welcome.
Wiimote connection tips
It’s a testament to the brilliance of Joa Ebert and Thibault Imbert (creators of WiiFlash) that it’s even possible to connect the Wiimote to Flash at all, and I hope they continue their excellent work. Nevertheless, there are some pitfalls to be aware of—and here they are as I understand them:
Bluetooth hardware. Not all Bluetooth hardware will work with the Wiimote, so check the list of working Bluetooth devices before you buy.
Bluetooth software. The “stack,” or software that manages your Bluetooth connections, is another point of weakness. Consensus seems to be that the BlueSoleil stack seems to be most reliable (but not all hardware works with BlueSoleil—check the compatibility list above for details).
Server version. The latest beta of the WiiFlash server, 0.3, requires .NET to run. I’ve installed .NET but have never been able to get the 0.3 server to detect my Wiimotes, so I use version 0.2.
Playback. WiiFlash does not work when a Flash file is embedded in a Web page, only when it’s run in the standalone Flash player or viewed directly in the browser window.
Security. You may need to explicity tell Flash to trust the file you’re trying to run, which you can do using the global security settings panel. Click Edit locations -> Add location and then select the file or folder you want Flash to trust.
Not the end of the world, but not exactly a walk in the park either. I challenge anybody interested seeing more artistic work using the Wiimote to think about ways we can make this process easier for people. The Wiimote is a significant cultural artifact, and experimental Wiimote works should be accessible to as many people as possible.
Sample startup sequence. In case it’s helpful, here’s what I do to get things running on my Windows XP system:
- Launch BlueSoleil.
- Press the 1 and 2 buttons on the Wiimote simultaneously (this makes the Wiimote discoverable).
- Choose “My Bluetooth -> Bluetooth Device Discovery” in BlueSoleil (you only need to do this the first time).
- When the Wiimote shows up, right-click it and select “Refresh Services”.
- The mouse icon should highlight. Click it, and you should see a line connecting the Wiimote to the orange ball indicating an active connection.
- Launch WiiFlash Server.
- Launch the piece you want to view, either by double-clicking it or dragging it into a browser window.
Good luck! I’ll keep this post updated as new information becomes available.
