Interactive « Adam Luptak

Archive for the ‘Interactive’ Category

Jun

Life update + self promo

Oh Lord. If you’re one of the roughly 3 people who read my blog, you’ve noticed that I haven’t written in a while. So, what’ve I been up to since I’ve been gone?

PepsiCo multitouch installation

Work, mostly. StruckAxiom pulled off a kamikaze mission for PepsiCo—a multitouch installation on a super short timeline. You can read about the project at the StruckAxiom blog.

Also, on a whim, I tweeted a link to the post I did on the LEGO CL!CK site at FITC, an industry conference that’s been on my radar and inspiring me since school. The most I was hoping for was to get the link retweeted, but instead was asked to repost it on the FITC blog and to be a guest blogger for StruckAxiom on the FITC blog.

My first (and so far only—I need to get back on that) original post for FITC was titled “Lessons Learned: Adventures in Multitouch.” It was a pretty heady experience, having my first real post up, but even better was discovering that Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, has blogged about it, and highlighted it during his session at FITC Toronto.

Rigby Lake traithlon

Outside of work-related nonsense, I’ve been training. I competed in my first triathlon of the season over Memorial Day Weekend—a sprint triathlon at Rigby Lake. It was a cold, windy, rainy day, and a pretty miserable experience, but I got through it, and have my sights set higher—a Half Ironman at the end of the summer. But more about that later.

So, fingers crossed, you’ll hear from me soon!

Posted in Blog, Interactive, Life, StruckAxiom | No Comments »

Feb

Trip Back to Math Class

A recent project had me trying to find the distance between a point and a line segment, and a coworker reminded me that the distance from a point to the line can be found from the line perpendicular to the line, which passes through the point. That means figuring out the linear equation that defines the line segment. That’s y=mx+b, if you remember your Algebra days. I was stumped for a little while – stuck on the concept of solving for two variables with Actionscript. Actually, I was stuck on the concept of solving for a single variable in Actionscript, because I was being dumb.

Then, last weekend, laying in bed, I cracked it. Didn’t get around to writing the code until Monday. I wrote a LinearEquation class – capable of being given two points, a point and a slope (m), a point and a y-intercept (b), or a slope and a y-intercept – and builds a linear equation from it, in a manner of speaking – you can give it an x value, and it will return the y value. You can give it a y value, and it will give you the x. You can get the y-intercept, the slope, or the inverse of the slope – which will be the slope of a line perpendicular to that one.

Most importantly, the LinearEquation class has a static function – following the model of Point.distance() – LinearEquation.intersection(). It takes two LinearEquations as params, and returns the point where they intersect.

So we create a line and a point – then we get the inverse slope of the line, and pass that along with the point in to get another line. Then we get the intersection of the two, and voila, we’ve the line segment that is the distance from the point and the line.

Unless of course, that intersection is outside of the first line segment – that’s why LinearEquation gets extended by another class, LineSegment. But I’m not going to tell you all my secrets all at once.

So check out the demo I’ve set up. [ Line Segment / Linear Equation AS3 demo ]

And the practical applications for this? Not really sure yet, but there have to be quite a few. Just to name one or two, perhaps making line-segment checkpoints in a racing game, or part of an AI system where an enemy is shooting at you.

Maybe I’ll share the source sometime soon – if so, you can look for it here.

Posted in Development, Interactive | No Comments »

Feb

FWA – LEGO CL!CK

We interrupt your regular non-existent programming for a bit of news – the LEGO CL!CK site (legoclick.com) that I’ve been working on at StruckAxiom was today’s FWA Site of the Day. Of course, LEGO is a sweet brand to work on, and the whole creative team – which included Jon, Jeff, Matt, Anson, as well as myself – was awesome to work with, as usual, and they all rocked it out (again, as usual).

While we’re at it, I’d like to direct you to the Deconstruck blog, where I wrote a behind-the-scenes post about one of the most popular features of the site – exploding block walls. There are code samples and explanatory goodness, so go check it out!

Posted in Interactive, Struck | No Comments »

Feb

Techfit props

Well, this morning, the Adidas Techfit site, the first of a series of microsites that Struck is building for Adidas, was given the FWA Site of the Day award. If you’re not quite sure what that means, suffice to say they’re a good thing to receive.

I didn’t really work on this one at all – I just want to give props to Tyler, Wes, and Thom for rockin’ the development of this bad boy, and of course Jeramy and Jon for the design. Well done, gentlement.

Posted in Interactive, Struck | No Comments »

Oct

What's your Carfun Footprint?

So… since setting up here in SLC, what have I been up to? The first big project I worked on since coming to Struck full-time was the MINI Carfun Footprint Calculator.

MINI Cooper asks drivers to keep their environment in mind (something I wholeheartedly agree with) – but insists that drivers don’t have to sacrifice fun when they drive. Therefore: the Carfun Footprint Calculator.

At Struck, we had the task of building the calculator. My man Jon Minori workshopped the device with the folks at BSSP, coming up with a design for the device. My chief task was modeling the calculator in 3d after the design was solid – taking a 2-dimensional design, bringing it into 3d, and finally animating the device. The texturing of the device – making the chrome shiny, the leather polished, – generally making the device beautiful – was done by Jeramy Morrill.

The development team rocked hard on programming the device, and Jon and Matt Austin rocked the animations that occur on the device screen, particularly the Green Score and Fun Score animations, which featured illustrations by Dan Christofferson.

This is why it’s great to be at Struck – everybody rocks pretty hard.

Posted in Interactive, Struck | No Comments »

Feb

GRAVmarbler

It’s my second VE project, my first foray into the wild and woolly world of Flash Media Server.

Big learning curve, learned a ton. I think it has potential to be a good portfolio piece, but it’s gonna need some serious retooling.

So, for the time being, to finish up my last winter quarter at RIT:
GRAVmarbler || case study

Posted in Development, Interactive, RIT | No Comments »

Feb

gravMarbler test

Well, we’re in rapid development mode here… finally have turn handling working here. It’s very blackbox right now, skinning and prettying up will be coming in the next few days.

gravMarbler communication prototype

Posted in Development, Interactive, RIT | No Comments »

Nov

Velos, round 1…

Well, it’s been a mighty push… and it’s not nearly there yet. Many roadblocks overcome but many more found… all the same, here’s your first look at Velos. Enjoy.

Velos

Posted in Development, Interactive, RIT | No Comments »

Nov

A Noir Interaction

Final project for Adam… been working on it for a while, it’s due in a week, but I wanted to make a little splash with it here. It’s a game site, advertising a fictitious Maltese Falcon game. It’s supposed to be an experiential site, where you can move around the office of investigator Sam Spade.

The only problem being that at this point I’m running out of time. I’m cutting back like crazy – cutting out parts of the office to explore, cutting interactions, cutting takeaways… so it’s starting to look a bit trim. And I’m still kinda concerned about getting it done.

Click for a full-view of the comp.

Anyway, just throwing this out there. Check back in a week or so to see the real thing!

Posted in Interactive, RIT | No Comments »

Sep

Mancave, Phase 2

Saw earlier this week that the Mancave site that I was working on at Struck this summer finally launched the second phase of the site (which means more to explore, fewer bugs, and more of the stuff I worked on).

The Official Mancave

What I worked on – the photo falling onto the page (on the intro), the cards flipping out, the map flipping out, the “How to use cards” transition (in the Inventory), some of the magazine and book layouts, the letter magnets on the fridge, the bookcase in the Manbrary (books flying out and opening, tracking book covers into video), and the stitching, brushing, and otherwise Photoshopping the panoramic image of the street visible through the telescope.

Posted in Interactive, Struck | No Comments »