Pretty cool flash experiments
Came across this site and thought it was interesting http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com/ I especially like the 'liquid form' and 'gravity ball' effects... Any idea how he would have done it Greg?

LOL... those are cool, thanks for sharing! Believe it or not, there isn't much there that is ridiculously difficult. At the heart those are some pretty simple math procedures tied into the Flash vector drawing API (which handles beziea curves the way you would in Adobe Illustrator) and the BitmapData filters. There's actually a free open source variation of that liquid form one posted on senocular.com... check out http://www.senocular.com/flash/source.php?id=0.179. It's the same thing, these guys just made it look a lot prettier. So while those are some pretty simple interactives, they're done with outstanding execution to make them look cool. You'll notice that they rendered the entire site with Papervision3D to help with that. PV3D is a/THE open-source Flash-based 3D engine. While everything on that site is rendered with a weird skew, they're just creating flat content then throwing each movieClip onto PV3D planes at random angles. Hence the reason the menu changes perspective each time you go back to it. The one on that site that really kills me is that corner-render one. That's an unbelievably simple trick using a Flash distortion map filter... it's the same way I'd done that curved screen in the U23D website a few months ago. The chess grid was pretty simple too. They did also completely floor me with one... my jaw dropped over that friggin' clock. While it's about the most excessively intricate clock app I've ever seen, I give them major props for creating it. It IS cool.

Oh yeah, more globular dots: http://www.senocular.com/flash/source.php?id=0.176

Thats a pretty cool site! Im amazed at what Flash can do... combine these effects with Lassie and you could get some pretty interesting puzzles and gameplay...

Flash can do pretty much anything now days since they added BitmapData handling. At this point, you could pretty much build a fully-functional version of Photoshop using the Flash graphics engine. So, the question is no longer if Flash CAN do something, it's whether or not it's the best tool for the job.

uncanny valley... http://cubo.cc/

wow..... that is creapy

wow

probably not all that complicated to do, but I thought it was pretty cool! http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/28/arts/20080330_FOLD_IN_FEATURE.html#

Hey cool, thanks for sharing!! Those are great! Actually, that fold effect is fairly tricky given that Flash doesn't have any native means to perform perspective skews... It can only skew along a 90-degree axis; meaning that you can render into a parallelogram but not into a trapezoid. That kind of skew requires polygon rendering, similar to what they use in 3D. It's a cool trick; I got to do some of it on that U23D project although I can't take credit for the transformational matrix math... that was all written by my boss, who is friggin' brilliant. The raw mathematics that go into it is way over my head. What's cool about that fold-ins piece is its simple but beautifully elegant presentation. That's one of the best multimedia presentations I've seen in a while... It's intuitive, simple, fun, engaging, and yet not slopped up with tons of bells and whistles that overpower the content.

It's intuitive, simple, fun, engaging, and yet not slopped up with tons of bells and whistles that overpower the content. Yeah the interactive aspect isnt just there as an added bonus, it EMPOWERS the content. how tricky is the transition animation to do, when the current poster flies off screen and is replaced by the next one? Would quite like to have something like that in this thing im making at the moment...:P

Now THIS is just TOO cool! http://www.hrp.com/ (webcam needed)

Flash BitmapData magic: http://www.starbuckscoffeeathome.com/ The ghosting of erased chalkboard content isn't (technically) all that tricky, although they have done a phenomenal job with the execution here. And it's almost like they've used Mac OSX before... I can't quite put my finger on what it is about this presentation, but some aspects seem strangely familiar :D

wow thats freaky, You been checking out FWA by any chance Greg? I was going to post that one the other day! I was amazed at the leftover chalk effect too... it just MAKES the site for me. I also like the way its been structured... to begin, you have three choices, you aren't overwhelmed with options or buttons to click... you just choose what appeals to you the most and the site brings you to the content you need. I actually had an interview this morning for a year's placement in a web design company, http://www.eyekiller.com/ . The interview went incredibly well, and the Actionscript you've been teaching me certainly helped immensely! However the guy was telling me theyr moving away from Flash and are pretty much purely CSS now, in the interests of accessibility. Which got me thinking, has Flash got any sort of accessibility features built in? You hear Flash being derided because of its innaccessibility, but no offense to CSS (there are some beautiful CSS sites out there)... its very one-dimensional. Nice and all as CSS sites are, they're as interactive as reading a magazine for the most part (which is good in some cases of course), whereas Flash (used well) enables you to give the user a real fully-immersive experience... its a shame that that immersion needs to be sacrificed if accessibility is an issue (and I guess it should be an issue).