If you like art, and you like people, you’ll love Craftstravaganza - a rogue art and craft fair for handmade art. My wife and I attended last year and were really impressed with the talent and variety of artists – some really great stuff. Great gift buying opportunities at affordable prices.

At that time our baby clothing project was still in the design phase, so one of our goals for this year was to apply to become a vendor - and am pleased to announce we were accepted. Vendors are judged and a limited number are accepted so we were very excited. Come and say hi, and support our local artists. In fact, I will even offer $5 off any onesie or t-shirt if you mention this post! Preview our wares, http://orangerhinokids.etsy.com

Craftstravaganza takes place this weekend, complete information on the website: http://www.craftstravaganza.com/2008/home.html

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Saturday April 26th, 9am - 6pm
Minnesota State Fairgrounds - Fine Arts Building
Complete directions here

Our booth will be directly across from the band (yes there is music too!), our business name is Orange Rhino
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I had every intention of using my recently released SoundData class in an experiment with Papervision3D. I got pretty far: Picked out a good Armin Van Buuren track, had an interesting animation started; just hadn’t added the code to respond to the sound spectrum.

Unfortunately, once I loose a little momentum on one of these side projects, the likelihood of a bigger, better experiment stealing it’s lunch money gets pretty high. I grew rather attached to this latest experiment and, despite it’s somewhat ‘incompleteness’, I wanted to share it anyways.

Special thanks to Seb Lee-Delisle for the inspiration and all his particle work on Papervision3D!

Here’s the experiment. Enjoy! (there are several colors and speeds… so if you don’t like what you get on the first pass… refresh the page

I realize it’s been a while since my last flash experiment covering Audio Visualization with ActionScript… but fear not - I haven’t been taking a break. Very much the contrary

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My esteemed colleague Nik Rowell has graced these pages with some really cool Flash experiments in the past, which has inspired me to also explore the wonderful capabilities of ActionScript 3.

Audio visualization is a fun area to experiment in, as you can do some very interesting things with very little code. Nik showed us a unique way of looking at sound in this post. His code utilizes one mode of Flash’s sound compute spectrum method, which returns the raw sound wave data.

In my program I decided to use the Fourier transformation mode, which returns a set of calculations derived from the sound wave data. These calculations output a set of frequency numbers, starting with lows and ending with highs.

If your browser has Flash 9 installed click here to see a really cool song by Kate Havnevik brought to life with Flash. If you don’t see anything except the background right away, please be patient. On slower connections the sound may take a minute to load.

As many of you know, I’ve been spending a bit of my time exploring the cool features in ActionScript 3.0 - some new, some not. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by the SoundMixer class which has a special method, computeSpectrum(), that essentially takes a snapshot of the wave of a streaming sound (or an embeded sound, but I’m talkin’ 100% code here)…

The finer details quickly boil down to binary data, but the power of this is the potential to create audio-powered animations in Flash.

After a refresher in Trigonometry, some tortellini, and a late night (or early morning), I’m pleased to present latest ActionScript 3 experiment!

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For those of you who read my recent article on High Dynamic Range images, you’re already aware of the power of HDR in creating images that trample the boundaries of traditional photography. When pushed to the max, it’s quite easy to create eerie, surreal or just plain fake looking photos.

I recently did some night photography at the old train yard outside of downtown St. Paul, near Shepard Rd. The photo opportunities were endless. Surprisingly, both times I was approached by someone with a blaring walkie-talkie on their belt, I didn’t get kicked out - they only stopped to chat photography. And trains.

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Chances are, many of you have stopped to enjoy a sunset and taken a quick photo of your significant other to capture the moment. Chances also are that when you looked at the preview on your LCD (instant gratification!), you found that it was quite different than what you were actually seeing. Not in a bad way. In fact, some of those photos may have displayed even more vibrant colors and a nicely silhouetted subject. Not bad. Just different.

The reason for this is simply due to the nature of photography and exposure. New techniques and technologies, however, are blurring this discrepancy between our eyes and our images.

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I’ve done some more experimenting with the Papervision3D class library. This experiment uses a “Plane” object, the ArcStone logo for the plane’s “material” property, and a little bit of math to allow a full 360-degree view of the logo. The logo’s X and Y-axis rotation is determined by the mouse position.

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I spent a good portion of my holiday weekend sifting through the documentation for Papervision3D (let this load, it’s worth the wait!). Papervision3D is robust, open source ActionScript class library that aims to simplify the process of creating and animating 3D objects and effects in Flash.

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Just as promised, I have a more exciting experiment that makes use of the Grid Maker from my previous post. For those who caught the OOP reference in the title, the Mosaic Creator is actually not a subclass of the Grid Maker… although it probably should be.

After about $15 worth of Vanilla Lattes (which, sadly, is probably only 3), I’m pleased to introduce my Mosaic Creator - and AcionScript 3.0 experiment that dynamically creates a mosaic based on a few variables - photo, tile/cell size etc. Read the rest of this entry »