Inspiration. Quick.

Inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s work to prevent creative blocks… try this widget out when you are facing the wall.

Full of sage like quotes and abstract commands, the Oblique Strategies are a series of cards designed to be pulled out when you need to shake things up creatively.

I have tried to keep these cards as accurate as possible (even down to the 10 point sans-serif font!) to the real thing. The further you click away from the card, the more inertia you spin it with, and the angle of spin is entirely dependent on where you are clicking. It features all the original 4 versions – you can select between them using the controls in the lower left corner – the original version is still available from Eno’s shop. The only thing really missing from this virtual version are the 6 blank cards that came with the original. I will leave that for you create.

Try it out and tell me what you think!
Oblique Strategies : V5

Find out more about the original Oblique Strategies and order your own :

1. The Oblique Strategies Fansite
2. Buy your own

Surround Sound Chillage

Ever feel you just need a bit of harmony in your day, a few moments of clarity and calm? Find yourself battling with noise? Now you can relax online with the 3D Buddha Machine! Load it up and click until happy… if you feel it is too loud, scroll the mouse wheel.

What is it?

Based on the world famous Buddha Machine by FM3 (Zhang Jian and Christiaan Virant), this is an authentic online replica. Coded using the incredible Papervision libraries and my own personal Media Framework, the Buddha Machine 3D features all 9 original sounds from each the Buddha Machine I and II – kindly released under creative commons. Thanks to the magic of the internet, Christiaan popped by to offer his support. Thanks!
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What does it do?

Put on some headphones, click to find the sound for you, use the mouse wheel to set your volume, and relax. If you need a portable version, consider buying the original product – it fits in your pocket!

How does it work?

The Audio system reacts to the position of the 3D object, decided by the mouse, and considers one face as a speaker. As the object rotates this pans and fades the audio according to the trigonometry formulated from the angle between the user and the normal of the speaker faced plane. The volume is also reactive to clipped faces, and by that I mean speakers that are pointing away from the user, the further a speaker turns away from the user, the less it can be heard.

Sounds are loaded as mp3s from an xspf playlist and streamed, whilst the next track is pre-fetched to prevent gaps and loading delays when changing sounds.

How was it made?

I decided to avoid Flash entirely and instead use the free FLEX compiler from the Adobe site. This was mainly to see how using the FLEX compiler affects the size and performance of swf files compared to compiling through Flash, but also to see if I could avoid non OSS software. Process wise, using this development system, along with swc files for symbols, it is possible to create amazing web apps absolutely free of charge. As I am saving up for the next Flash, but in the meantime this lets me test out new features in the player right now! I see a synthesizer on the horizon next

Once you perfect your workflow, and don’t mind creating libraries of swc files, this is probably the most integrated and fastest method for Flash development. There are many tweaks and hacks that you have to apply to the commandline if you want to use a preloader, or don’t need all the FLEX libraries, or want to set a player target version, but thankfully, my development system of choice, FlashDevelop, has all of these as options preset in the GUI.

On the negative side, using the FLEX compiler does seem to add quite a few extra bytes to the runtime code, so at least consider a preloader!

Check it out

Buddha Machine 3D I.

Alias Wavefront 3D Render

Part of a multi-frame animation used as the visuals during my live music sets.

This was one of my earlier works, primarily made to learn 3D using a serious package like Wavefront and Maya. The results were okay, and after many hours playing about with lighting, textures and motion paths I was happy with the single frame renders. However, for a relatively simple mesh the render time for the movie was astronomically huge (even on a Sun SPARC!) and so most of the animation was rendered using simple shaders.