SourceBinder is an open source project by Visual MINDS and is currently in private alpha stage. While waiting for your invitation, take a look at our former project, FlashFilterLab.com.
Working with a software that is in development state is a quite unpleasant thing to do. The lack of documentation, features changing from day to day, bugs on every corner and such things are the common attributes of development releases. As SourceBinder of course makes no exception from that, it makes it even more astonishing to see what some users get out of it. As a matter of fact there are only few better things to do, than to watch compositions that were made with our tool. And ever since we have invited the first few alpha users, there has been one guy who always manages to draw our attention with his compositions and that not only because of his commitment and enthusiasm. So this post goes to Stevie, and his dancing spheres composition. Keep it going mate!
Oh, before i forget! The tiny black window is our new feature to enable composition creators to choose any attribute that “makes” a composition. Those published attributes automaticaly appear in this control to enable the viewer to try out the unlimited variations one can get.
Things are getting exciting these days: we have been invited to present SourceBinder at the FITC Amsterdam 2009. The conference will be held in February 2009, so be sure to check in if you are around somewhere. We have a lot of ideas how to make the presentation a live tutorial performance, but i can’t tell you more right now. The timing by the way seems just to be perfect, February should be the month to release a public version of Binder. There are quite a lot of things to do but it should be possible.
Anyway, have a look at the speakers list from the conference, what a cool selection. More info about the conference: www.fitc.ca
Our long awaited Flash Forward Award, the big rubber arrow just arrived with FedEx. It is surprisingly heavy, but makes a really good sculpture for my desk. The only problem is that everyone would like to touch it. Have a look instead..
We had the honour to present SourceBinder at an EU conference about the future of ICT in Budapest. The title of our presentation was “Highly innovative software engineering“. As we did not had time so far to create complex applications with SourceBinder to proove how good our framework is to prototype applications, we had to create one very fast. We started one day before the conference so it was a nice challenge. Our goal was to create an application that visualize images put on a yahoo maps based geo tagging service, indageo.hu (sorry its in Hungarian) Our company made this system for a well known hungarian news portal index.hu, and with it’s service anyone can send MMS messages from hungary to a given phone number and based on the location that we get from the GSM cell information, the system puts the images right on the map. Images can be uploaded and put on the map as well. More info in english about this sytem can be found here: guanxi.hu
Alright but back to the topic, the whole thing got ready 3 minutes before my presentation was due. I can tell, that was perfect timing. But i can not complain, with the fact that such an application was ready in less than 1.5 days is a quite good proof on rapid protoyping.
The protoype: drag, zoom to navigate, click on thumbs to fly
Our former most favourite toy, FlashFilterLab won the famous rubber arrow in the category application on the FlashForward festival in San Franciso. We were quite surprized when we read the news. Unfortunately no one could make it from us this year to Frisco, but i hope we will be there next year with binder too, cause like one of our mates said: if people like FlashFilterLab, they will go crazy about Binder. I really hope so. So as a tribute let me just put the trailer video of FFL here. Have fun!
This composition is so fun to play with, we will definitely make a directed movie out of it as soon as we get some dancer move for us again. This cut was done in 2005 for a little experimental movie we have done with flashfilterlab. I will publish a link to the video as soon as i find it.
usage:mouse moves the camera, scroll wheel moves the dancer front/back
Dear visitor, take this long chain made out of particles and try to tie a knot on it. The first who succeeds gets a free sourcebinder invitation immediately. Screen shots can be sent by email to our address.
The vertical mouse movement drives the amplitude of a low frequency oscillator (LFO) applied to the chain. The values coming from the LFO are used as an input for a queue wich defines the particle arrays particle position.
We are sorry to inform all of you who applied for alpha invitation ( from 04.08 to 12.08 ), that due to human error your email addresses were lost. Please use link below, to check if you are still registered. You can apply for the alpha again where you did last time ( and we promise to keep your email addresses this time )
Here are two creative compositions, that were made in collaboration by our very first sourcbinder alpha users. The first one uses PV3D particles and the bitmap effect layer to create a “3d-blurred” dizzy particle field. The second uses sound3d to play and transform mp3 sound in space and a sound spectrum node with a cube array to visualize the sound.
Making a carpet out of a simple plane is not as difficult as it seems. Just drive the plane through a modifier node and use an image stream as the modifier source. A video or the webcam footage will be perfect. The modifier node displaces the vertices by an offset calculated from the corresponding the pixel values of the mapped source image. The best result can be achieved with a white background and a dark object. Alternately you could also use an interactive sprite and convert it to a bitmap. If you have a webcam and you are in a bright room you have to check out the second composition.
I was so excited about And Zupko’s work with the new Papervision effect branch, i just had to give it a try in SourceBinder. You can try the compositions and play with the setting as usual (from now on) in explore mode. If you have a webcam you should connect the MovieMaterial node to the Sphere in the first composition. You can do that either by Alt clicking the MovieMaterial node and droping the line on the Sphere node or with the output connector of the same node. SourceBinder will aply the connection automaticaly on the material input of the sphere, because of its type. Have fun!
While we are are still preparing for a public alpha we just decided to let our nice visitors also play with some composition. So we made an explore mode for SourceBinder which in fact is the environment but with only two features enabled: binding and adjusting. Be sure to doulbe click on one of the nodes in the compositions and try to play with the atribute values and of course watch the result in realtime.
Take a video from a dancer, cut off the background with a threshold node, put every frame on a plane into a 3d space and there you go! The same works with the webcam as well, asumed you have a solid background. Driving the whole thing with the wiimote you get some pretty cool stuff. Click on the image for a video showing the composition with a wiimote.
Here is a video that shows the process of making a basic physics simulation in SourceBinder. In the simulation, 60 spheres are bouncing on a plane. The plane’s rotation is driven by the pitch and roll values of a wiimote. The physic simulation is done with the great WOW phisics engine, for the 3d rendering we used Papervision3D primitves and the Wiimote handling is done with WiiFlash. Click on the image to watch the video.
This video tutorial shows how Binder can be used to create a Flash movie with 3d objects (using Papervision) and regular Flash stuff, like perlin noise and glow filter mixed together.
Spheres dancing in the fog
