Swinging with the London Flash Platform User Group

Announcements, Events, Flash, Wii,
7/25/07

Word comes from across the pond that Swing is going to be shown at tomorrow’s London Flash Platform User Group meeting.  At a one-hour session called “Fwii Style” (all these Wii puns remind me of the early days of the Macintosh, when all software had to have “Mac” in the title) Adam Robertson of Dusty Pixels will hold forth on the wonders of Wii and Flash:

Forget your PS3’s and 360’s, the Wii is officially the coolest console ever, all thanks to its innovative Wiimote controller. And now you can get in on the motion sensing goodness using Flash.

In this session we’ll take a quick look inside the Wiimote to learn a bit about how it works, then discover how you can use it to control your own Flash projects, both through the official Wii browser (with the Wiicade API) and on your desktop (with FWiidom & WiiFlash). Much arm waving guaranteed.

The followup session, called “Make Things Physical” and taught by Leif Lovgreen, sounds pretty great too:

An introduction to physical interaction. Adobe Flash, the Make Controller Kit from MakingThings and a handful of analogue sensors. This session covers the basics of getting started with analogue input as an interface to Flash.

Expect strange things like ice cubes, food, flashlights and a boxing ball to be natural ingredients in this session.

Interaction with analog sensors was something I thought was still beyond the capabilities of Flash; glad to hear this barrier’s coming down.

Those in London environs, take note; sounds like an interesting evening.

 

Wiimote tutorial best practices: “Zack & Wiki”

Exemplary Work, Games, Wii,
7/20/07

One of the things that’s apparent in this first generation of Wii titles is that many developers have underestimated how much attention needs to be given to instructing the user in how to hold and move the controller.  Static icons don’t cut it anymore; you’ve got to have animation, and even then it takes some finesse, as simply playing a loop of the controller being waved around can still be confusing if the loop point itself unintentionally conveys some kind of gesture.

The best in-game controller tutorials I’ve seen to date are in the upcoming title Zack & Wiki.  They actually show a little 3D animated guy (upper body only) holding the remote, along with text prompts.  Seems like overkill at first, but it’s actually great because you not only pick up on controller movement, you also get posture and timing.  When necessary, they can also switch to a first person view of the figure, or even a “disembodied hand” view to aid with object manipulation.  Check out some videos of the interface in action, the game does look pretty fun.

I wonder, though, you think they’ll let you customize the guy’s skin color? I’m assuming he’s not a character in the game but is supposed to represent some kind of abstracted ideal human, which opens up a whole set of issues… many of which Anne Friedberg and I also ran into when picking silhouettes for The Virtual Window Interactive (and which we tried to skirt by letting users create their own).  Gestural interfaces are increasingly going to require representation of the human form to explain, so whose form do we represent?  Do we need an interactive 3D update to the 1974 AIGA/DOT symbol system?

 

Image jam no. 1

Animation, Exemplary Work,
7/17/07

Scratching the surface. What else belongs here? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

 

 

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