Yesterday John Dowdell blogged about the new Flash 8 video capabilities mixed with new bitmap caching and how Andreas Rehnberg has created a new piece of game software called the playdoCAM. Rehnberg uses Flash’s Camera() object and new bitmap caching to detect pixel change and control games, light fires, and more. FlashMagazine looked at it and remembered a simple bubble pop game made by Protozoo that detects sound to blow bubbles and dark pixels to pop them. While Rehnberg immediately thought he should sell his take on this idea for game and ad development Protozoo is giving us the code.
The Protozoo zip yields the key with the line: new _global.flash.display.BitmapData( 320, 240 ). This gives Flash access to a cached bitmap screenshot of the Camera() object stream that can be checked for pixel shade (for the bubble pop) or compared frame to frame for change (motion detection). Let’s take this a step further and create a site that is fully motion navigated. Limit your motion detection to a specific space. Photograph your user’s face or hand or whatever and use the colors found as a joystick.
Want to learn more? Protozoo thinks BitmapData may come from Director’s Lingo programming language and from what Rehnberg says about his inspiration, I’ll bet a Director programming guide would be very useful.
Viewing the Flash will require Flash Player 8
1. Actually, that's not entirely true. PlaydoCAM has been available for over 6 months for motion tracking in Shockwave using todays Flash MX functions.
It has just started to be converted into Flash 8 and contains many other features including physics (so you can through and catch things).
Posted at 10:03PM on Aug 12th 2005 by Andreas Rehnberg