So that I can share it with anyone else who’s interested, as well as store it somewhere safe where I can control the versioning I have uploaded the classes to my new google code page. At the moment the only package that’s hosted is the menu class, over the next few months I will probably upload more, as well as code examples to help create specific effects using these classes.

http://code.google.com/p/lukelibs/ is my page. And I will try and document the classes and give code example in the wiki, although you can always download the menu package now as the classes are heavily documented and not particularly complex.

I’ve just spent the past 4 days at this years Flash on the Beach conference, and honestly, it blew my mind! Last year was my first year and I found that fantastic, but the speakers and content at this years conference was exactly what I wanted to hear. It was a great place to be inspired and to catch up with friends, here are summaries of the talks that I saw:

Day 0:

Papervision3D workship with Seb Lee-Delisle – I kicked off the week with an official training workshop from Seb who is also a member of the Papervision3D team. It was fantastic and really gave me a good understanding of the basics of Papervision3D and introduced me to the basics so that I now feel a lot more confident and working on a Papervision3D project. Expect to start seeing some PV3D experiments appearing soon.

Day 1:

The shoemakers son always goes barefoot with Carlo Blatz – This talk was extremely interesting and Carlo was explaining a new working practice that they had introduced in to the PowerFlasher studio. The basic idea was to split a large project up in to many, many keywords. A team that consists of designers, programmers, creatives and other individuals then work collaboratively to try and create a solution that work with a handful of these keywords in two week iterations. At the end of the two weeks the current solution is given to the client for direct feedback. Then they pick another few keywords and incorporate these in to the next two week iteration. Eventually creating a final solution that solves everything, but couldn’t have been conceived at the very beginning of the project.

Fear/Love with Rob Chiu (aka. The Ronin) – Rob gave a detailed explanation of the process he went through to create his most recent short film. He explained the casting process, his reasons for choosing the final cast members, the locations, the grading process and the way his initial ideas were eventually developed in to the final piece. This was a really interesting talk that was also a welcome change from more typical ‘Flash’ talks that took up the bulk of the conference.

Cybernetic Art Revisited with Dr Woohoo – This was a great talk from Dr Woohoo where he shared a wealth of information, images and videos about cybernetic art. He’s spent many years devoting his time this topic and had some fantastic and inspirational examples to share with the audience. I definitely left this talk feeling more excited about working in Interaction Design.

Inspired with Joel Gethin Lewis – A fantastic talk from Joel explaining some of the projects he’s worked on recently and whilst working at United Visual Artists as an Interaction Designer.

Day 2:

Quick as a Flash with Grant Skinner – Grant shared many tips with the audience including optimising ActionScript and graphics. He spoke heavily about ‘thinking’ more when it comes to building an app. Making sure that you only do a set amount of actions per frame so that you give the Flash Player enough time to run it’s own internal Garbage Collector.

An Interaction Designers guide to play with Andy Polaine – Andy spoke about many aspects of Interaction Design and gave examples of successful projects and the ways Interaction Designers can create more emotional connections with a user by creating a more playful interface.

We make our own tools, and then they shape use with Karsten Schmidt – Karsten showed the audience some of the incredible work that he has been responsible as well as the work that other people have produced with the open source libraries that he has created to help people developing computational art. His work always impresses me and is one of the main reasons I’m excited about working in the processing environment to create interactive art pieces and complex data visualisations.

Day 3:

Connecting the dots with Mario Klingemann – Mario blew my mind (along with the rest of the audience) in this session and explained his interests in complex Math and how his reading and experimentation developed in to the examples he shared with us. For example he built a fantastic tool that could create an almost limitless variety of visual effects by changing tiny variables in a Cellular Automata simulation.

Work/Play with Seb Lee-Delisle – Seb gave a playful and engaging talk about making sure you balance playing and working and how one can affect the other. He issues 3D glasses to the audience for one demonstration of his interactive pong game which allowed the whole audience to affect the game by waving glow sticks which were picked up by the webcam.

Flashed Fashion with Andy McDonald – Andy spoke about the work he has been doing creating Flex applications that allow a user to create a completely unique textile design which can then be saved as an xml file and imported in to Illustrator and the Photoshop and outputted to a large textiles printer.

Seeing sound with Jared Ficklin – Jared’s talk was probably one that I laughed the most in. His attitude and sense of humor is fantastic, and seeing him hook up some tubes and speakers to a propane canister and use fire to visualise the different sound frequencies was exceptional.

Space with Joshua Davis – The conference closed with a final session from the legendary Joshua Davis. It was my first time seeing Joshua talk and he definitely did not disappoint. He is a great speaker with great work and an animated sense of humor. Definitely a great way to end the fantastic conference.

RGB TouchOSC experiment from Luke Sturgeon on Vimeo.

I’ve justed uploaded the processing source file for this experiment, you can download it here. You will also need to download the TouchOSC iPhone app and follow the instructions on their website.

Working as a freelance designer/developer has but me in a really fortunately position, I have a constant – if not exhausting – demand for work which keeps me busy, challenged and keeps my bank account happy. It also gives me the opportunity to take time off when I feel it is necessary and to spend time developing new skills and exploring other creative avenues. I’ve never been one to settle, I need to try new things and to constantly put myself in new and sometimes difficult situations and freelancing is the best way for me to continually do this. So my new challenge and also my (why didn’t I think of this earlier) is to start taking time out to research and experiment with physical computing and to read and read and read. I’m going to actively try and push myself further in to interaction design.

As Massimo Banzi quotes in Getting started with Arduino “Interaction design is the design of any interactive experience.” I am already familiar with and have been creating interactive online experiences since I started as an interactive designer 3 years ago, but what I am going to do now, is start exploring tangible experiences. I want to be able to create a physical environment that someone can use to interact with a digital environment. I want to create objects that you can touch and feel and play with instead of using the more traditional keyboard, mouse and monitor.

I have been researching and following the development of several MA Interaction Design courses at institutes around the world. However there are always pros and cons for making the design to enroll on an MA course and so far I haven’t find a course that combines all the areas I want to work in, but wont cost me £30,000+ for the fees (not to mention living costs for a 2 year course). The cons simply outweight the pros. So I’ve been contacting working interaction designs and asking them about their background and experience and how they came to work in this field. These discussions have opened up a whole range of alternative ways to gain experience in Interaction Design.

This lab will now become my primary place to document my research and experiments in Interaction Design. I am going to starting reading, watching and talking interaction design. I’m planning to taking the time to visit design events across the globe such as the Ars Electronica festival, which I’ve unfortunately had to miss this year as I found out about the dates too late and already had work commitments. I will storing any relevant research on this lab as well as the working and failed experiments I end up creating. I’m sure I’ll end up re-designing this lab when my new portfolio launches along with several new pages such as reading lists and projects.

This was a tiny 20 minute experiment where I am using the mouse to paint the video from my webcam directly on to the stage. The pixel colour is taken from the webcam.

Webcam painting from Luke Sturgeon on Vimeo.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Things have been soo busy recently, I’ve had some really exciting projects to work on including more portfolio websites and online ad campaign and my handy work is even going to be featured on a TV campaign coming up.

There has been a bug in flash that has always niggled me, and I’ve always wanted to try and find a solution but for one reason or another never had a chance to. This bug occurs when you dynamically insert text in to a TextField in Flash which is allowed to autoSize and then selected all the text by dragging. In most cases, as you drag down the text will scroll up 1 line and you will loose the top line. This is a really ugly bug.

After reading Tomek’s blog post on the same bug and his fix , I’ve managed to discover what the problem is and the slightly modified (improved… cough, cough) on Tomek’s solution.

Tomek’s solution worked perfectly, which was to insert the text, store the height, set the autoSize property to NONE and then manually increase the height of the TextField. This means that the text fits within the resizes TextField fully and does not need to scroll.

The thing I didn’t like is that I was just adding 10 pixels to the height. What if I was using a large font size and that solution didn’t work? After some experimenting I found that the value you need to increase the height of the TextField by is the leading. So if your leading is 0 the bug will not appear, if you leading is something crazy like 24, then you will need to add 24 pixels to the height of your dynamic TextField. It seems that when Flash resizes the TextField as you flow the copy in, it doesn’t take in to account the leading, or at least ignores it on the last line.

My Solution is this:

1. Set the autoSize property to LEFT (or similar)
2. Insert the text
3. Store the height
4. Set the autoSize property to NONE
5. Increase the height by adding the leading value of the TextField’s TextFormat object.

text2.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
text2.text = lipsum;
var h : Number = text2.height;
text2.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.NONE;
text2.height = h + text2.getTextFormat().leading;