One of my company’s latest works. Giant multi-touch wall for Vertu.

Vertu Constellation Launch Event from InteractiveLab on Vimeo.

Flash is still worth something.

P.S. follow us on Vimeo, Facebook or Twitter.

Once upon a time there was a small site — favouritewebsiteawards.com/. Years 2000 – 2004 were the golden age of Flash sites. They were interactive, colorful and heavy. At that time I had a blog at valyard.ru with daily links to the coolest sites and games. I bet it had been one of FWA’s link sources for a while.

Since then FWA has grown into a well-known and respected award in the industry of  Flash sites, my resource has well been forgotten.

But recently (a couple of years ago) favouritewebsiteawards transformed into favouriteeverythingawards featuring really everything on the net and some offline stuff. How can you compare a heavy interactive informative site with great UI and lot’s of videos with a WebGL experiment, or a music video, or an offline installation? Let’s examine this year’s Sites of the Month:

• January, Lego Star Wars — Half game (which is supposed to be multi-player, but I was alone ther), half site with great graphics and animation.
• February, Die Hipster — Looks like a game where I don’t gave a clue what I am supposed to do, so I don’t like it q:
• March, Greenpeace – A New Warrior — This is a typical multi-media content site which is well-done, contains a lot of data and serves some real purpose.
• April, Wall of Fame —  Great multi-user experience. A site with user-generated content which actually has it (the content). I voted for it in Peoples Choice Award.
• May, Pleasure Hunt — Another half game, half site. Entertaining way to present a brand.
• June, 3 Dreams of Black — WebGL experiment/interactive music video. Great demonstration of the technology.
• July, The Museum of Me — This is actually just a music video, not even interactive. But the idea behind it is brilliant.
• August, Sexy Fingers — This site doesn’t load on my machine, but I checked on a colleague’s PC and it looks like complete crap. Seems to be a bunch of sex-related games which are totally not work-safe.
• September, The Planet Zero — This one is awesome! The third half game, half site but uses pre-molehill software 3d rendering engine. ROXIK is the greatest!
• October, Being Henry — Really well-done interactive video.
• November, The Honda Experiment — Some kind of HTML “The Incredible Machines” game made with pop-up windows.
• December, Androp Bell — That’s just an awesome game. Great idea and really well-done.

Unity3D is great for indie developers. We have yet to build a large Unity project, but we’ve built a couple of small projects so far but during this process we did see Unity3D from the ugly side. It seems that the engine can do some things blazingly fast and easy but some other ones were clearly neglected during development. But that’s another post.

So, I’ve tried to find out how big teams work on large Unity projects if even we are struggling. But no luck.

Ones were mumbling about source control, separating control over scenes editing etc. That’s kind of obvious and shows that those people don’t have any experience at all.

But recently I watched all the videos from Unite 11 conference. I really wish I could visit it and talk to Unity gurus. But anyway, here are the videos I found useful. Videos where speakers share their experience on working in Unity3D as a team. The information which is practical and useful:

It’s still not late to mention that we (Interactive Lab) got featured at video.unity3d.com.

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo.

The talk is rather long but is definitely worth watching.

The author talks about:

• Studies and references of “well-known” information concerning software development. Which are lacking.
• Time estimates and that all techniques and applications to calculate time needed for specific tasks are worthless.
• When refactoring is useless.
• How software complexity increases with adding more features.
• Code metrics don’t work.
• And how we need to ask for the sources of information we get.

The same iPad app made with Flex and AIR 2.7. The first list contains 480 items, the second one 280 items. Scrolling looks smooth. Not as smooth as native one, but looks good.

Just captured this video of sample AIR Flex application I posted long time ago.

As you see it runs MUCH better. Scrolling is smooth, transitions are OK. It’s not as fast as native iOS applications but looks like finally you can make more complex iPad apps using Flex than a simple scrolling list.

Adobe did great job with AIR 2.7!

Finally I finished the video from FlashGAMM 2011 Moscow where we exhibited our multi-touch table with Fluid Pong game based on MSA Fluid library. The game was developed using Scala and Processing and was a major success at the conference.

Multi-touch Fluid Pong from InteractiveLab on Vimeo.

What’s more, it is open source and is availabale at GitHub.

Here’s the PDF with slides from my talk at FlashGAMM 2011 Moscow about Flash, NUI, Multi-touch and Kinect. Also check out the post with links and references.

Skeleton tracking test from InteractiveLab on Vimeo.