I’ve just come back from the excellent three day Flash on the Beach conference. Here are a few highlights:

Jeremy Thorp did a great session on ‘emergence’, discussing how complex systems arise where relatively simple interactions take place between lots of individual things.

A beautiful example of this is flocking:

Flocking can be simulated by giving each agent (bird) a set of simple rules to follow:

- move towards the general direction of all agents

- move away from your immediate neighbours

- move towards general direction of neighbours

This was first modeled by a clever man called Craig Reynold in 1986 and most recently used by Cogapp in Processing to model swarming fish for an interactive installation…

Jeremy Thorp then showed some beautiful work based on giving colours weightings and allowing them to trade as if in a visual stock market:

The Colour Economy: Test Pattern from blprnt on Vimeo.

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Mario Klingemann stepped through the process of reading a QR code in Flash.

Once read the coordinate mapping system developed during this project can be used to create augmented reality tests. This is similar to the work being done by Active Vision Group at Oxford University though it’s Flash rather than C++.

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Jonathon Harris lived up to my (high) expectations with the final talk of the conference.

I love the fact that the large data sets collected from some of his interactive pieces are still kept and in use:

- in 10×10 you can now go back to anywhere in the last 4 years and view the top 100 news stories/images collected from Reuters and the BBC.

- there are something like 11 million imprints in the We Feel Fine database which have been analysed by some American universities to reach some odd (and not so odd) conclusions such as:

- in general people are getting happier

- there is a dip in happiness in the summer (I expect this is just because all the happy people have stopped blogging and gone outside…)

He ended by showing some affecting work from his next piece and encouraging the general internet / interactive communities to create work based on strong ideas and not to get too hung up on technologies (which he espoused in a much broader and more interesting way than I’ve summed up here).

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A few other technical sessions I liked:

Koen de Weggheleire gave a fun educational talk on a complex topic - matrix maths to create visual effects (blur, emboss, find edges, and OSX Photobooth style effects).

Richard Lord gave a really clear talk about his open-source particle engine - Flint.

Particles seem to be the route of a lot of Flash / Processing creative work - a lot of Eric Nazke’s is based on lines being drawn between particles (massive over-simplification - great work, great speaker):

Chris Allen gave a speedy run-through setting up Red5 (open-source flash server, i.e. a Flash Media Server replacement) - great to see this technology really maturing.

Joa Ebert has too many brain cells and uses them to create a Flash based audio tool (Hobnox) along with Andre Michelle - really impressive problem solving within the Flash Player.

Looking forward to the next one already……

We’ve recently been playing with Open Frameworks (our first test project will show up in a blog post very soon) which is a C++ library that aims to provide people with some of the power available from a low-level programming language, while lowering the bar for entry.

There’s a small but ever expanding group of people making beautiful things with code, using similar tools to Open Frameworks.  I’ve always found this kind of work inspiring - it’s a great way for beginners with creative leanings to get into code.

Here’s a little rundown of some of the tools you can use and some of the work that’s inspired me:

Adobe Flash - at one time Flash seemed to be only tool that let a newbie play with throwing graphics around the screen while learning a little bit of programming.  Now it’s all grown up which means a great development environment (Flex Builder 3) with an excellent language (Actionscript 3) and a powerful player (Flash Player 9), but a higher barrier for entry for new creative coders.

Here are a couple of golden oldies (from around the year 2000):

Soulbath  (see http://www.hi-res.net/ for recent work)

Yugop (beautiful new interface here )

Processing - the granddaddy of easy access computer generated art.  Initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, former students of John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab.  Specifically designed for graphics while hiding coding complexities (although you can get to them if you want), and a lot more powerful graphically than Flash (at least until Flash Player 9). An easy to use subset of Java.

Interactive video for House of Cards by Radiohead

Videos by Flight404

Open Frameworks - the young pretender, possibly with the most power. It’s a C++ library that gives you lots of simplified methods for doing things that can get quite complicated in C++/OpenGL (such as loading images/sounds/movies). Also comes with a bunch of add-ons including the OpenCV (see some examples here) library which is an Intel library used for motion detection.

I Want You To Want Me by Jonathon Harris

A few other tools:

Nodebox - Mac only Python based 2D graphics tool.

Quartz composer - node based Mac only tool (similar to vvvv or Max). I find this way of working quite crazy, but you can get beautiful results very quickly with little or no code (whether you can get the system to do exactly what you want is another question though).

Silverlight - Microsoft’s interactive, ‘cross-platform’ offering.

Following the launch of the new Letsema Mapping Interface, I thought I’d write a little about how it works and how Letsema are hoping it will benefit them.

“The Letsema initiative is committed to fostering co-operation, collaboration and communication between all funders and aid providers in Lesotho”

Using a combination of geographic coordinates, overlay images and a filtering system we have taken advantage of the Google Maps API to create a map pinpointing the location of organisations and amenities in Lesotho.

Here’s an image of the map with everything (so far) switched on:

The filter system allows the user to toggle the visibility of the organisations/amenites. It also doubles up as the maps legend:

Each filter type can be expanded, showing all of the individual places under that heading. These can then be clicked and the map will zoom to the respective location:

New organisations who wish to provide aid in Lesotho can use this map to work out where their aid may have the greatest impact. The aim is to work out where there is an imbalance between town/village populations and the density of organisations.

Feel free to give it a try at: http://www.letsema.org/html/atlas.php

While watching a video about the UK Museums and the Web Mashup Day, I came across ManyEyes.

ManyEyes is an IBM service for data visualisation. You can upload data and then visualise it in dozens of different ways (one of the nicest of which is Wordle).

For example, here is a clickable tree of the text on war memorials (data from the National Maritime Museum):

Or, one I created myself, a Wordle of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: