Tilt a chat a blob dodo, Parallax a Penguin, Multi multi user touch, Spectral Flash with Dan Zen

Dan Zen comes out of hypernation with a collection of advanced interface Birds – Birds? – for Flash.

FLASH FEATHERS

ROBIN – multiuser chat and realtime game classes with Flash and PHP
FALCON – easy data transfer between Flash and server scripts
HUMMINGBIRD – parallax effect with mouse movement for 3D menus
GOOSE – multitouch emulator with just Flash and Browsers
PENGUIN – tilt emulator and processor for tilt and translation apps
WOODPECKER – sound frequency and wave animation for MP3 and FLV
GOOSE – motion capture so a cursor follows your Web cam motion
DODO – blob detection of motion in a Web cam

Thousands of lines of code has gone into the Flash Feathers series so that designers and developers can create the functionality of each in a half dozen lines of code.  So… let anyone you know who works in Adobe Flash about the Flash Feathers site at:

http://flashfeathers.wordpress.com

If you are interested in advanced interfaces but do not code then you may still want to watch the video section of each bird site as we go through the examples.  All the working examples are in the zips.

Dan Zen will be performing Hula songs in Hawaii for the next while and may have some time for a feature later in the summer.

Dan Zen to talk at WordCamp Toronto Open Source Festival May 8-10

The Toronto WordCamp is May 8-10th and you can get your tickets for $50 – amazing price… $35 for students and $185 group rate for up to 7 employees.

http://phug.ca/wordcamptoronto/

WordPress is the most popular Web content admin system famous for its bloggers and open source community.  This blog is a WordPress blog

Sounds like a great event to get our students and friends out to and you can’t beat the price.  As a matter of fact… if we can we should try and sponsor the event.  I have put in a request to marketing and we will see what happens.

Hope to see you there – leave a comment if you and a group are coming.  Oh… I am giving a talk there from a content creator standpoint at least.

Dan – 09

Interactive Valentines Card – You Move My Heart

An interactive valentine for the special one in my life

Happy Holidays – Interactive Snowflake

Happy holidays – you can drag the shapes around to make your own!

http://www.danzen.com/snowflake

Dan Zen

Cool – just reached 10,000 views…

~08~

Mystery Games Without the Annoying Plot! Mood Mysteries – For your Mystery Party of Four or More – Makes a Perfect Gift!

Mood Mystery Party Games

Plots?!? Who needs a plot! Mood Mystery games let players feel like they are involved in mystery without that annoying plot! Make up characters and clues and act all mysterious and maybe some plotters will plot a plot as the hilarious game play plays.

Visit http://www.moodmystery.com to find out more!

Makes a perfect immediate gift for your hard to get friends or family!

~08~

Dan Zen Wins Sheridan Chess Tournament

Dan Zen was able to remain undefeated in the 2008 Sheridan Chess Tournament in Oakville Ontario.

“It was a great tournament although the highlight for me was the second place game which was a crazy back and forth battle!”

Dan Zen is the creator of the simple chess application called Flat Chess at http://www.flatchess.com.

Modes of Tilt and Translation Interface for Mobile Devices

Tilt Emulator Showing Front View Yaw Mode

Imagine we have a mobile device with hardware and software that can capture tilt (pitch, roll, yaw) and translation (x, y, z) motion.  An accelerometer can more readily find tilt but a camera can find tilt and translation.

If hardware and software can leave this information in the format of a TiltML (Tilt Mark-up Language – XML based) then front-end software such as Flash can make use of the information as interface.

A simple example would be to look down on the mobile device and tilt the device to roll a ball through a maze.

Here is an example Video:  Tilt for Mobile Devices Video

Tilt Emulator with Top View Tilt Mode

A device can be looked at in either horizontal or vertical orientations.  But there are a number of different ways these two orientations can be viewed.  We will call these ways, modes.  Here are six modes of interface:

MODE 1:  Top View Tilt
Looking down or up at the device and tilting in pitch and roll. Rolling a ball through a maze.

MODE 2:  Front View Tilt
Holding the device in front of you vertically and steering with yaw. A racing game  where the device is like a steering wheel.

MODE 3:  Top View Translation one Axis
Looking down and using one translation (y axis) as motion and tilt to steer. Walking or running creates motion in the game, pitch and roll or yaw to steer.

MODE 4:  Front View Translation one Axis
Looking forward and moving forward causes forward motion in game (z axis).  Walking, running or driving creates motion in game and then steering with yaw.

MODE 5:  Top View Translation all Axes
Looking down and mapping out two or three dimensional space with translation and yaw.  Finding virtual items in real space looking down (or up)

MODE 6:  Front View Translation all Axes
Looking forward and mapping translation z plus pitch or roll to map real space.  Avoiding obstacles or capturing items as you walk

Combining these modes leads to Full Space where the device acts as window to alternate virtual space in full 3D.  Putting these devices in front of your eyes is a form of mediated reality where you can diminish or augment reality.

Thee Gnostics Psychedelic Space Rock Band Discovered in the Tarken Files

Thee Gnostics were a psychedelic space rock garage band from Hamilton, Canada in the 90s.  Archives of video, sound, pictures along with descriptions can be found in The Tarken Files.

The Tarken Files shows any Web video, sound, pictures and text.  Thumbnails for the files are presented with rollover scrolling text beneath.  Click on any thumbnail or use the arrows to browse more files.  A viewer will appear with either video, audio, picture or text navigation.

The video navigation has a full screen button at the right.  Hit escape or the reduce screen button to exit.  The sound navigation has a reduce button at right that closes the pannel but keeps the sound playing in the background while you browse pictures or text.  If sound is playing in the background, you will see a sound icon on the right side of the video, picture and text viewers so that you can adjust the volume or go back to the sound.

There are tabs at the right of the viewer that open the ratings, comments and information panels. To rate, roll over the rating at the bottom and submit.  The comments and information panels (and the text viewer) have a scroller if necessary that lets you scroll through the text.  You can also single click through the pages or double click to go to the top or bottom page.  The information panel shows you the views as well.

The Tarken Files have been excavated from a Galaxy Long Long Ago yet seem to also span the future.

Stick Aliens are Here! Found by Oracle Proximity Intelligence…

Agency Zen has launched its second facebook application.  Stick Aliens lets you use the Oracle to determine your alien tendencies.  To use the Oracle just drag the eye or any of its icons around and then the Oracle will provide a Stick Alien vision on your profile page.

Stick Aliens on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/stickaliens/

The plan is also to launch Stick Aliens through Open Social and one day enhance the feature to solve mystical puzzles based on which aliens your friends have.  Enjoy!

Many a Love Guru Keep in Shape with Psychedelic Dancing as Exercise

Here is a post from ZenVlog that summarizes various interests in guroovity. Enjoy!

Click to View Vlog
or see: Part 1 | Part 2

The movie The Love Guru is coming out soon – looking forward to it!

All gurus of love psychedelic dance as one of their forms of exercise.

Dan Zen dances to The Garden – a social environmental Indian / Arabian / Persian sounding a Capella yodeling psychedelic song! Please see the video on YouTube. Or download the song from SoundClick. Or visit the Dan Zen page on facebook.

Dan Zen wears his San Francisco Groovy Guru robe. The one he wore for the International Groovy Day poster. Should we choose a day for that? Or should it just be any day? Oh… also check out the Love Mash – the robe shows up there too and it would be cool if some more people made Zen Mixes and maybe someone will make us a love mash!

Dan Zen also “starred” in a movie called the Guru Monster Movie. Some of that can be seen pictorially on Thee Gnostics mySpace page – more to come as TheeGnostics.com site happens.

In 1996, Dan Zen traveled to San Francisco and wore a guru robe – quite a beautiful traditional green robe with yellow embroidery. He was at the Macromedia Conference where Shockwave was unveiled. A flower lei held his festival pass. An Indian guard, after much deliberation, came up smiling and said, “You know… in my country… the women wear those robes”.

Get dancing people! Loosen up – no steps to follow – you can’t go wrong and it feels great – puts you in touch with your body and nobody has to know! Unless… you start vlogging it with Zen Mix!

Utopia – Erotic Mystery launches on flickr for 10 Year Anniversary

Dan Zen is posting the images from Utopia – the erotic mystery on flickr to mark the 10 Year Anniversary of the mystery that had thousands of people lined up for the $500 prize.

Visit the flickr Utopia Set

Visit the flickr Utopia Slideshow

(please view on slow and set options to not “embiggen”)

Promotional images are currently posted and starting Friday May 23, 2008 the mystery pictures will be posted one day at a time (12 pictures per day – 6 days).

Have fun! Please visit often and tell friends.

~ 08 ~

Group Games Presents Nano Race! on facebook

Group Games is a new concept that in a sense hacks the facebook groups to create games where the leaders are those with the most group members or pictures or wall posts of a certain type, etc. Here is a link to the Group Game group on facebook. Note, that anybody can make a group game and it does not require coding. If you are interested, please consider adding it to the group game page and be part of the collective.

Nano Race! Is the first group game where you join one of the groups that are working towards being shrunk to nano size to gain great speed, strength and riches. How exactly that works is up to the players to role play. The group with the most explorers is winning the race!

The game hearkens back to early Dan Zen social networking games of Blimp Race and Shrink Ray. Please see the post on Social Networking, Social Media and Social Gaming.

The groups are pictured below but do not link through to the game. It is best if you join the overall game group for nano race by clicking the Join Group link at right. Then pick one of the groups by clicking the link to the group and then JOINING the colony group. Then invite friends and write on walls to role play the game.

1. Join the nano race group
2. Join the colony group of your choice
3. Invite friends to join your colony group
4. Write on the walls to role play the game

Have fun!

Social Networks, Social Media and Social Games on Dan Zen

Here is the Dan Zen board interface from 1998 (Read about it on this Blog). All this talk of Social Networks reminded me of my Social link up to left. This was really my blog announcing the latest things on Dan Zen through one of my “barnacles” Eg Orna. The barnacles were all anagrams of their colors.

More to the point is that just this corner of the site shows five social networks and games – they are still active and some started in 1996. To date there are a couple dozen social games on Dan Zen averaging about two per year over twelve years. They can be seen thought the Social Category at the right of the blog – please note there are two pages with the second page being accessible from the top.

The five social games shown in the corner are (Moustache Mysteries is a game for individuals):

1. Spirogram where you send and receive encoded messages.
2. Salamander where you go into a park with a bunch of others and try and find a spy called the Salamander based on clues.
3. Opartica where you can share portfolios or individual op art creations.
4. Hip Cats, an all out social network with accounts; ratings of other hip cats; dating; friending; indication of favorite movies, books, and music; top ten hip cats newsletter; a buzz section with user created music, book, movie and Website reviews, happenings, protests, koans, radical ideas, first times and translations that turned your words into certain hip moods like psychedelic, beatnik, goth, urban and surf; messages; ratings on products; tie-ins to affiliate Amazon purchasing; templated scenes for organizations to host a Hip Cats site complete with stats, word filtering, self modifying drop outs; all programmed in DHTML within months from its launch.
5. Password Paradox is another self modifying social game where the passwords you guess right are actually the passwords that others have already guessed.

Another thing I noticed recently was the Loves You tag on the top of the flickr logo (replacing the alpha or beta that once was there helping bring in the age of Web 2.0 gizmos). Dan Zen used to put We Love You at the bottom of a number of pages often after introduction and help pages. Examples are below. You can still find them on Hip Cats and other pages. Of course we are all welcome to love! It was really nice of flickr

The Next 50 Years – Futurist Inventor Dan Zen

1980’s

Personal Computers | Bank Machines | Networks | MiniVans | CD ROM | e-mail | KB

1990’s

Internet | Online Shopping | Search Engines | Portals | Pictures | SUV | DVD | Webmail | MB

2000’s

Environment | Social Networking | Mobile | Broadband | Hybrid Cars | video | Thumb Drive | Messenger | GB

2010’s

Cradle To Cradle | Electric Cars | Oled Walls | Digital Paper | Micropayments | Nanotech | Solar Panels Everywhere | TB

2020’s

Mediated Reality | Genetic Tech | No New Gasoline Cars | Oled Everywhere | Room Junkies

2030’s

Public Space Travel | Molecular Computing | Implants To Extend Life 10 Years | Holograms Everywhere

2040’s

World Council | No-waste Nuclear Batteries | Artificial Intelligence Passes Turing Test | Communication Implants

2050’s

World Currency | Space Resorts and Colonies | Life Extended By 40 Years | Nano Plague | Mind Mapping and Storage

Why Have a Blog and How Blogs Can Be Used

Dan Zen would like to encourage people to blog and perhaps more generally to create content.

META VIEW
A blog for Dan Zen is a meta view of content. The games, gadgets, tools, art, etc. content exist and the blog is an organized way to provide information about the content. This frees the content from verbosity – which is handy when your features have embedded or hidden interface. Blogs help features remain simple. If you have a product or service site – then keep it simple with just the facts. Then blog about your product or service in a free and more relaxed voice.

NEWSLETTER / PRESS RELEASE
Blogs with their RSS or Atom feeds are the new newsletter – the new press release. Subscription is standardized across many free readers including traditional e-mail clients. Nothing is lacking in infrastructure – if you do not have a reader then please find one or set one up – google reader, Thunderbird (down there in the news and blogs folder) and subscribe to this blog via the entries feed link at the bottom – and join the millions who get their news and updates this way and will not go back.

SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS
Blogs have excellent search engine placement due primarily to their title being placed in their URL as well as their network of “Blogrolls” or links. Dan Zen has become the number one psychedelic dancer in the world (according to Google) through blog placements.

PORTABLE AND POSTABLE
Blog posts are portable. For example, the content of the Dan Zen facebook page comes from blogs. Post once, display many places. And writers or editors can create and update their own posts without delay because blogs have easy content management systems built for anyone. You do not need a Web team for maintenance and your site is less likely to get stale. Oh… they are free even for many gigs of space.

DAN ZEN BLOGS
Here are some sample Dan Zen blogs. Posts are occasionally cross-posted to the main Dan Zen blog (this blog) making the Dan Zen blog quite diverse in subject matter. Of course content helps and being a mad inventor, there is no shortage of content. Dan Zen has been blogging since 1996 with his now defunct Social Page and Telepathy Newsletter to 25,000.

ZEN VLOG
http://zenvlog.com
A video log using the vlogging tool Zen Mix to mix video on picture or event interactive works. Content includes Phsychedelic Dancing as Exercise, Environmental messages, A nano antigravity sci-fi mystery called META told by ages 5 to 100 and many more.

INVENTING WITH DAN ZEN
http://inventor.wordpress.com
Discussions and tips on inventing including connections with the philosophy of Nodism, experiences from being a patent agent, video of offline inventions, unjunk movement, environmental inventing by distribution of ideas as opposed to physical product.

INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA
http://interactivemultimedia.wordpress.com
The Blog for Sheridan Interactive Multimedia one year post grad program in Oakville Canada including many innovative and current code samples for creating interactive video, video motion capture, frequency beat analysis, and a variety of event information, links to countless multimedia pioneering blogs and more.

BANVAN
http://banvan.blogspot.com
A new environmental blog encouraging reconsideration when purchasing minivans, SUVs and trucks. Includes a spottings chart of license plate numbers and encourages others to enter their spottings.

FOCUSO
http://www.focuso.org
Out of focus photography for artistic intention. This blog shows examples and discusses the reasons why out of focus work can be included as a part of so many features as background.

NODISM
http://www.nodism.org
A blog on the philosophy of Nodism. Nodism takes our learning in Object Oriented Programming as the way we model life in gaming and simulations and XML as the way in which we share and represent data and applies these two hierarchical systems to the philosophical value of viewing life as a single hierarchy leading to node zero. The hopes are the most logical people in the world will see this as a philosophy they can explore and use to reach further understanding.

WANNAGET
http://wannaget.blogspot.com/
Experimenting with Blog games where people come back every hour to get more objects. WannaGet is set up for Harry Potter, James Bond and Narnia but anyone can start a WannaGet game and put it on their blog.

TAPOLL TECHNOLOGY BLOG
http://tapoll.blogspot.com/
Tapoll is a poll where you get to predict the results as you vote. This blog needs some loving and if you want to be a technology blog editor, please let us know. The blog discusses and allows for discussion about technology issues and centers around a tapoll poll. Tapoll makes use of Chikita ads and revenue sharing is hopeful!

FALCON
http://falconflash.wordpress.com/
A blog to help designers connect between Flash and Database. A Falcon class is provided that turns 15 complex lines of code into 3 simple lines of code. Uptake from search engine traffic has been wonderful and it feels good to be helpful.

SHERIDAN BLOGGERS
http://sheridanbloggers.wordpress.com
A new blog to encourage all students, grads, faculty and staff from Sheridan College – the second largest art school in North America to aggregate their feeds to show up on Sheridan Bloggers. It has just been out a few weeks and participation is positive, Talks are underway to encourage teachers to blog for their programs and get students blogging as well. There is a facebook presence which reads in the RSS feeds as well.

One area of concern is comments. It has been hard to get comments despite open invitations. Perhaps Dan Zen needs to get out more and comment on other people’s blogs – too busy creating . Dan Zen created comment right at http://www.commentright.org to try and remedy the comment issue – the results can be seen on Zen Vlog but we shall persevere.

Perhaps the BlogPreneur contest below will bring more people or people who are used to commenting. That would be very rewarding.

In 250 words, tell entrepreneurs at the conference how you were able to successfully get your blog up and running…

Blogs allow you to easily publish to many people. People can subscribe to your blog to be notified of updates like a news letter or press release. Blog pages also have excellent search engine placement due to the way their title appears in their URL and the linking power of blog networks.

Blogs come with a very easy content management system. You can publish in one place and distribute to many places such as a facebook page without extra work. You do not need a Web team to maintain your site so it is easy to keep the site fresh. Blogs are free even for gigabytes of content.

Dan Zen is a mad inventor with hundreds of inventions ranging from food to out of focus photography, mysteries to meta philosophies. Many Dan Zen inventions are Web games, gadgets and communities found at http://www.danzen.com. This is the Dan Zen content.

A blog for Dan Zen is a meta view of content. The content exists and the blog is an organized way to provide information about the content. This frees the content from verbosity – which is handy when your features have embedded or hidden interface. Blogs help features remain simple. If you have a product or service site – keep it simple with just the facts. Then blog about your product or service in a free and more relaxed voice.

Make a blog with your first post in ten minutes at WordPress or Blogger like I did at http://danzen.wordpress.com.

Tapoll – Now You Choose Which Polls Go On the Front Page!

Tapoll is the site where you get to predict a poll as you vote. Now, you can decide on which polls go on the front page. That is, until someone else decides on a different poll.

Visit Tapoll the Predict-a-poll site

To view polls you can choose a poll topic at left, choose the latest 20 polls, or see all topics. Once you choose a poll, you can predict and vote on the poll. Just above the poll is a link that says front. Click this link and confirm that you want the poll on the front and it will be placed on the front page of Tapoll.

See the YouTube video showing a brief demonstration of Tapoll

Have fun!

flickr Photos (not video as flickr has now added video – more on Flickr Video below) from Dan Zen

There is a site that tiles pictures from Flickr and here is a link to the latest Dan Zen shots arranged according to “Interestingness” determined by Flickr . There are many pages so please relax for a few minutes and have a browse. You can click on any picture and then choose the all size icon at the top of the Flickr page to go to larger versions of the picture.

flickr

Flickr is the photo sharing site owned by Yahoo. It is an amazing site of countless photographs organized by tags and put in groups by photographers (professional and not) from around the world. Here is the Dan Zen site on Flickr.

flickr VIDEO

Recently, flickr has added the feature to post video. This is something that I perhaps wanted 3 years ago but now with YouTube and Blip.tv and all these other video sites I think it is perhaps an unfortunate move by Yahoo. flickr was pure and in its purity had strength. It does indeed have an amazing organizing system and I can see the value of locating video in the same way we locate pictures. And there has been a bit of a lull on flickr so perhaps it will help but my intuition is that it is unnecessary and perhaps unwanted as the Flickr “We say NO to Videos on flickr” petition group below indicates.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/no_video_on_flickr/

Currently with 21,000 members.