Rob’s geeky discoveries Blog

The latest site I’ve been working on has been live in Germany for a week or so now and is running nicely so thought I’d do a quick post in case anyone reading is interested in what I’ve been building lately…

If you can read Deutsch – the live site is http://www.blivebeatology.de – the version I’m linking is a showcase version in English so you’ll have a clue what’s going on. The basic premise of this site is that you upload a picture of your face and get back a video of yourself beatboxing but there’s a hoard of other functionality to explore and a big social element including a Facebook App so you can post your generated videos and share amongst your friends. The amazing video assets are all custom shot by Superglue and we’re very proud of it all. A holiday is in order for me but I shall probably do a bit more of a write up on it at a later date.

So… if you want to try it out or see an example grab a passport style photo of you – higher res and higher contrast the better ( sub 500KB) or if you don’t have one to hand, save this one below to your desktop. You’ll need a decent video player like VLC to watch .FLV directly but our system also generates an AVI. I’ve linked the image below to the generated AVI for this image and you can watch the FLV for it here if you prefer.

The back end will map the image onto one of 4 3D meshes, analysing it and applying one of several matrices to get the best fit and generate the videos on the back end which then send it back to you in Flash. We’re also creating 3GP videos for mobiles which are downloaded via a QR code link and allowing Webcam upload as a photo submission method so have been very busy.

Enjoy the beatboxery

I was looking for some basic working examples of PureMVC framework based apps to get my head round the Mediator Interface stuff and found a lovely demo over on Josh Weatherspoon’s blog. I’m not trying to claim I wrote this, just rejigged it so you can use Flash Develop & the Flash IDE not Flex (Hooray!) and if you do too you’ll find this a heck of a lot easier to understand as it’ll compile straight away.  I also updated it for the latest Kuler API (colour swatch generator)

Click the above for a demo & grab the source inc FlashDevelop 3 Project File & bundled non SWC PureMVC libs here.

Cheers Josh, nice one