this is portable

Well, I almost got each day’s review up on the actual day. Day three was just a little too crazy to find any time to write up a review, though.

Who will be the designers of the future
Lydia Varmazis (Adobe)

Before I saw her segment of the keynote, I wasn’t planning on attending this session. But, I thought it would be interesting to hear Adobe’s take on currents trends and what they’re planning to do as a result.

Lydia summarized current trends she and her team see affecting the design industry today: Personaliziation, Crowd Sourcing, data visualization, democratization and quick jumps to fame.

Lydia didn’t tell us what Adobe was planning for too far off in the future, but she did show some cool new kuler features that would be released soon, like pulling colours from flickr images. She also showed some really interesting visualizations of kuler upload and download trends by country. Definitely some interesting results. I hope they make that data public in the near future.

Building Multitouch Interfaces
Brett Forsyth

This session was all about the DIY methods of building your own Flash-based multitouch interface. Brett went into a lot of great detail of the different multitouch set ups and the pros and cons of both. He was also really honest about the shortfalls of using Flash. But, the Flash Player team members in attendance seemed to suggest that these shortfalls may be corrected in the future.

At the end of the session everyone was invited to check out the mutlitouch cabinet he brought with him and play some multiplayer Tank.

My Favourite Things
Grant Skinner

This session was tagged as being technical, but I think it could really have been billed as a creative session. Creativity with code, that is.

Grant demoed a few of his Flash code experiments and talked through how each evolved. He talked about how he often goes back and tries to improve upon past experiments which was definitely a theme I heard in other sessions as well.

The main message from his session was to expieriment as much as you can because you will benefit from it in your professional work. Modualizing and streamlineing your experiments will help save time in future experiments.

Grant has posted his notes on the talks section of his site.

Playing with Chaos
Keithe Peters

This session was definitely a making art with math kind of session. Keith’s talk was all about fractal patterns and the forumulas you can use to draw them with code. The chaos was the fact that very small variations of the input into these formulas will dramatically affect their end results to the point of being unpredictable.

It was a heavy but interesting session. All the math was a little overwhelming at times, especially for someone like me who isn’t very Mathy at all. But Keith did a good job of describing the theory behind the forumulas which kept it interesting.

Check out chaos-101.com for more info from Keith on fractals.

Cinematic Motion Design
Dstrukt

Just in case you thought I spent the whole day listening to people talk ActionScript…
Two guys from dstrukt talked about where they get their inspiration and showed off some of the great motion graphics work they do. Which is, as you might know, some very cool work.

Breaking Away
Robert Hodgins

The session was actually called Alchol and Amazon and the main theme was cool things you can do with a whole lot of little ordinary things. Like a sculpture made with toothpicks, or a partical emitter that reacts to musical input.

Robert showed some of his very amazing work done in processing concentrating mostly on his more recent pieces that respond to audio input. He also went into some detail on how these pieces were built and showing how the smaller visuals pieces built up into the full piece. I didn’t realize that he actually mapped the aduio cues out manually (with the help of a tool he created for himself).

Robert also emphasized the importance of experimenting and especially the importance of starting small with your experiments. His parting advice to attendees for their experiments was: Chose your colours; Mistakes are your friend; and Start simple.

Today’s review is going to be shorter than yesterday’s review and I have two really good reasons for that. 1) I stayed out a bit too late at the Influxis party at wrong bar the night before, and 2) I doubled up on a few sessions when two I wanted to see were running at the same time.

Basically I’m really tired and went to way more sessions than I did yesterday.

The Pixel Whisperer
Mario Klingemann

This session was great. Totally worth dragging yourself out of bed after only 4 hours of sleep. Mario showed some awesome samples of what you can accomplish using the basic bitmap methods and filters in Flash. And it wasn’t just your everyday bitmap manipulation.

He showed a Motion Tracking example based on analyzing the differences between frames of web cam video. Then, built upon that to demo the basis of a multi-touch interface by motion tracking white finger tips of gloves. There was almost dancing involved.

The session finished off with a demo of a.viary.com’s Peacock. Also know as “pixel lego”.

The Madness of Interaction
Gurpo W

These guys started an interactive agency in Mexico when there were no other interactive agencies. They do some amazing work. You can check some of it out on their site. (It’s not in English, btw)

I also liked that they took the time to talk a bit about their process and what they learned for each project. That approach makes seeing great work all that much more interesting.

Creating the Next Generation Happy Meal Toy
Julian Dolce

I wasn’t actually planning on going to this session. Jose convinced me to go at the last minute and I’m really glad I did.

Julian not only showed the really cool interactive happy meal toys that Fuel Industries have been working on, he also went into a lot of detail as to how their team got through such a project.

He went into a lot of detail as to how they made the shift to working on a project with a longer timeline and working in a bigger team. All the internal “behind the scenes” of a larger team info made it one of the best sessions of the day for me.

After all that, there was lunch. Followed by craziness for the first half of the afternoon.

I was torn between sessions so, I sat in on a little Flash 2D and 3D effects before jumping into see James Patterson’s Modulate More. Then ended up checking out New Works to see some of what Joshua Davis is up to these days.

Making Real Music with Flash
Andre Michelle

Andre Michelle is obviously way smarter about all things audio than I am. He started out going into a little bit of detail on how to generate sound out of Flash. Then, showed some sound experiments and finished up with a demo of what you can do with the Hobnox Audio Tool. I especially liked the Flash-based vinyl scratching experiment. Very cool.

North Kingdom – An Inside View
David Eriksson

North Kingdom is a studio located way up in northern Sweden. So North, in fact, they only get a half hour of daylight around Christmas time.

This presentation was mostly about the studio itself and how it worked. There’s actually an amazing amount of high quality work being produced in Northern Sweden. As David pointed out, there’s not much else to do but work in the town they live in.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing because North Kingdom has produced some quality interactive pieces, including the Get the Glass game that got a lot of press last year. Check out their site for samples.