Director

I warned you about this: I am getting famous! I got featured on the front page of the blog of Dutch technology lifestyle magazine Bright!

Here's a couple of videos of me at this summer's panorama conferences, showing the setup I brouight to Bright, as well as some others:

When I've been working too hard on projects that take a lot of energy, I often indulge myself in doing something completely different (though Tessa would argue that it's still behind a computer, so it is not all that different).

Adobe released an update for Shockwave yesterday, with better support for Vista.

In my cursory test of the new release on a machine using Vista, it seems that hardware acceleration of Shockwave 3d content is working again! SPi-V content now works like you'ld expect it; nice and smooth.

Two weeks ago, SPi-V for Flickr stopped working for newly added images. A shame, because SPi-V is getting quite a following over at Flickr.

Yesterday I released the first beta of SPi-V 1.4, adding support for (streaming) directional audio, amongst other things. Here's a demo showing streaming directional audio.

Note how the directional audio not only changes in volume as you move past, but the sound actually travels from left to right (and when you are looking 180 degrees from the sound source, the left and right channel are actually reversed!).

Lately I have been working with Flash Components in Director to some extend. There's a bug in the way the Flash Xtra handles 'undefined' values that's proving rather inconvenient.

When no items are selected in the List Component, selectedIndex, selectedIndices, selectedItem and selectedItems are all set to 'undefined' in Flash. Unfortunately, the Flash Xtra thinks that means the property does not exist, and an error is thrown in Director when getting the property: property not found.

When Macromedia released Shockwave 10.1 (and by the name Macromedia, you know that that has been a while back), they introduced support for Flash 8 content. Unfortunately, the update broke the builtin eventlisteners for Flash Components, a feature that was introduced in Director 10.0

If you try to access resources from domains other than the domain a Shockwave movie runs on, you get an ugly and intimidating dialog box. If there are no other options than to use the files off the external domain (eg if you are using a web service, like I am for the SPi-V Flickr interface), you can proxy the contents using php and curl (if your webserver is configured to allow this).

Here's what I use to get and serve an image from a Flickr server and maskerade it as a local file:

function getImage($imageurl) {
 // create a new curl resource
 $curlinst = curl_init();

 // set URL and other appropriate options
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_URL, $imageurl);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

It's always fun to discover people using the SPi-V engine. When the Flickr blog featured an equirectangular photo by hangglide, I found out that Flickr has a small but loyal following of SPi-V in the equirectangular group. They are using SPi-V to display their panoramas, directly off the fieldOfView site.

Cool as that might be, there's a security limitation in Shockwave that pops up a dialog box when a Shockwave movie (such as SPi-V) tries to access files from a different domain than the one the movie itself is hosted on. To work around this, I have implemented a make-shift php-based proxy, that maskerades images on Flickr servers as a local image on the same server as the SPi-V movie.

REALVIZ and fieldOfView jointly announce the availability of updated versions of VTour and SPi-V 3d.

VTour uses REALVIZ' image based modeling techniques to create 3d scenes from panoramic images. I was asked to write a viewer that displays the resulting scenes. The SPi-V3d viewer is an extension to the core SPi-V engine, which combines the panorama-features of the engine with the exciting capability to step outside the box of a panoramic image.