Outsmart Labs

It’s now my chance to plug my blog over at munkiihouse.com (pronouced ‘monkey house’)

This is the place where I share tips, tricks, thoughts and gotchas relating to flex development and web2.0 in general.  I cover a wide range of stuff on my blog, but some of the highlights include a Drawable Canvas, a Genetic Algorithm Implementation and my Intelligent Video Buffering Component.

 

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Some of the Outsmart team, have been starting their own Flex-related blogs. This is ample evidence that Outsmart doesn’t beat all the creativity out of their staff, as there’s still plenty left over for after hours. So over the next little while we’ll be giving these blogs a plug on Outsmart Labs.

First up is my very own Better Than Flex, which has been up for a few weeks now. Some interesting components in there including an ASCII video player and a Light Gauge.

In recognition of great aesthetics, this week we’ve written and opened up a Flex implementation of the dock component made famous in MacOSX.

http://dev.getoutsmart.com/labs/dock/

All code behind the demo can be found here and is freely available for you to use, share and modify.

This is an older demo showing a ‘depth of field’ effect in our 3D engine.
http://dev.getoutsmart.com/os3d/demos/earth/

If you want to see depth of field, tick the checkbox at bottom-right. The effect is achieved by rendering the Earth and Moon onto separate 2d layers, then applying a BlurFilter to each that varies according to distance from the camera.

Controls
Mouse interaction is the same as before; click and drag to pan around, and shift + drag to zoom in and out. Certain animation modes restrict the camera - for example ‘Orbit and Zoom’ controls both panning and zooming.

The demo Darren mentioned earlier is now online:
http://dev.getoutsmart.com/os3d/demos/videoroom/

This demo shows standard 2D Flex UI components projected into a 3D world. You can interact with them using mouse and keyboard in the usual way. There’s a video that you can play on one of the screens, a Flash movie, and a few other random components such as DatePicker and PieChart. Give it a go!

Controls:
Move the little guy around by clicking on the floor of the room.
To look around, click and drag with the left mouse button.
To zoom in and out, hold down shift, then click and drag with the left mouse button.

Virtual Chat
We’re currently working towards a full 3D chat environment, with customizable avatars. The animation below gives a little sneak-peek of the work in progress:

One of the problems that rears its ugly head when creating an whiteboard application with freehand drawing is the large amount of data that needs to be sent from the client about the lines being drawn. When you’re pushing flex as hard as it can go, you can sample about 50-80 points off the mouse per second. This creates a lot of packets that have to be sent to the server and echoed out to all the other participants in the whiteboard session.

Even at this sample rate, the smooth curves that you’re drawing will degrade to terrible-looking jaggedy line segments when you’re moving the mouse at any sort of speed.

At Outsmart, we’ve developed an algorithm that kills two birds with one stone by cutting down on the data sent by 80% - 95 % and smoothing out the lines to pretty curves. The curve approximations can be adjusted for a compromise between better accuracy or more efficient bandwidth usage, but even at the leanest bandwidth setting the curves are a pretty decent approximation of what you actually drew.

So go ahead and try it out

We were privileged enough to be the hosts of the first New Zealand Flex User Group meeting earlier this week, which gave us a chance to show off some of the technology we have been developing recently. I noticed that a few blogs had mentioned our demo, so thought it might be a good idea to post up a few screenshots and briefly describe the underlying capabilities that it demonstrated. Hopefully we will be able to post up a working demo in the next week or so.

The demo was based around our new 3D rendering platform, which will be deployed in a number of commercial projects we have currently under development. The platform is designed as an all purpose 3D engine, but with a number of performance tweaks that enable us to create virtual spaces with a large number of avatars and other 3D objects, and still have it perform well.
 

Features of the platform include:

• Realtime polygon rendering engine with texture mapping
• Perspective and isometric rendering modes
• Free and/or fixed camera control
• Depth of field rendering effects
• Ability to project any Flex UI, Flash SWF or FLV onto any 3D surface
• Ability to interact with a Flex UI in 3D space

And so much more. We will be extending this platform over the coming months and will progressively release demos here at Outsmart Labs. Watch this space.

The 2 phrases we heard time and time again when showing people our wares at the Webdu conference were “wow that’s awesome” followed by “I didn’t even know you guys existed“. Andrew Spaulding of Adobe suggested the brilliant idea of creating a developer-centric site through which we could show off some of our works-in-progress as well as contribute code and experiences. And so Outsmart Labs was conceived by the Flex Daddy himself (with a little pelvic thrust from us). From here on in I’ll be passing the reins over to our developer team where the probability of the use of words such as “compelling” and “engaging” and other marketing-oriented artifacts are much less likely to arise. Go to it boys!