A new Geek Club video for you all to enjoy this Friday…

This is a demo of some of the capabilities of the upcoming Flash Player 11, using the alpha Molehill APIs, and a pre-release version of Flare3D. It uses the Spinosaurus model from the AR project we did for the BBC (SpinARsaurus Challenge), and highlights the vast difference in graphical capabilities between previous versions of Flash (up to version 10) and the next release.

The model itself contains 10,000 polygons, which left the CPU working very hard even at 25 FPS, using Papervision3D and software rendering. Now with 60 instances of the same model, it renders extremely smoothly even at 120 FPS. Molehill and Flare3D – along with a number of other up and coming FP11 3D engines (Away3D, Alternativa3D, Unity3D) – also open up further possibilities with full support for complex shaders. In the demo, we went for a shiny, cel-shaded appearance. All the danger of a raptor, plus a backful of spines and twice as slippery. (This is also why they don’t need to move their legs to get around. No friction.)

The animation comprises a red vs. green game, starting with one red (zombie) dino, and 59 green (uninfected) victims. When a red catches a green, they join the bad side. And if they hit the edge of the square, or each other, they bounce off, dazed, before resuming the chase/escape. Just like how scientists predicted spinosaurs behaved in the wild, centuries ago.

Ladies and gentleman it’s been a while. I won’t spend long on the soap-box, and where possible will stimulate with moving pictures, not words, but the important new is – Adam Vernon has joined Thought Den and hopefully you’ll come to love him as we already have (despite his gammy eye, though he insists it’s a new, Bristol-based affliction. He moved here especially you see! A good stat for Bristol Media perhaps – Thought Den drag Edinburgh graduate 400 miles to new Bristol studio)

Below is video 01 from our new Geek Club series, charting the Den’s trials, tribulations, banter and revelations. Think Blue Peter, without the bog roll tubes. Or HP Labs, but with less money and more sellotape.

Adam says :

“It makes use of the OSC protocol (likely eventual successor to MIDI), which is normally used to transmit musical and audio control data over UDP. The iPhone app, TouchOSC, is designed to be used as an OSC controller and also supports transmission of accelerometer data, indicating the orientation of the phone. The UDP packets are received by a Java flosc server, running on the PC, which retransmits the OSC data over Flash-friendly TCP. On receipt of a packet, Flash assigns the received orientation values to the rotationX and -Y properties of a cube made with the Flash10 3D API.”

Word on the street is that we’ve moved studio. An official (and thoroughly imaginative) announcement will follow forthwith. Isn’t it a shame that ‘real’ work gets in the way of devising these witty and clever ways to let you know we now stare at different coloured walls when Firefox crashes? Soon your inboxes will sing to the sound of Thought Den’s latest self-indulgent, digital distraction. Curious? You should be…