Video Motion Capture

Until three months ago, I had heard of Flash and used it briefly. But my general thoughts about it were around the idea that it was a technology used to create web pages intros, and this tendendcy is out of date and not longer popular. (At least according to me and my web browsing preferences).

After having been learning ActionScript for a few weeks, I am amazed of how powerful this language is and the amount of experiences than can be created with the use of Flash and AcionScript 3 (AS3).

AS3 reminds me a lot of Java, with event  and object oriented features, since my first exposure to Java I was fascinated with the concept of  classes, inheritance, and how this brings efficiency to the code. So although I never went deep into programming, I feel already familiarized with AS3.

This time my project was to customize a video motion capture class, the Ostrich class. The Ostrich class is part of a set of interfaces created by Dan Zen. (Read more about Dan Zen´s advanced interface classes for Flash).

The new interface was about a frog leaping form one place to another according to the movements registered by the video camera connected to the computer.

This is the initial state of the interface:

And after confirming the use of the video camera, we saw waht the camera was capturing in the back ground.

Although the whole functionality was already developed by the class creator, I spend time creating a new interface to implement this class, and even by doing that I learned how the classes worked and how to implemented in new elements.