North Kingdom

This week the dev team had a couple of nice days in lovely Amsterdam at FITC. It felt pretty nice to leave the snowy chaos for a while to walk around the cozy narrow streets of Amsterdam looking at leaning buildings, people on bikes and the coffee shops. However a few of us were well prepared for the worst, wearing snow-shoes and “rävpäls-jackor” in case a swift climate change should occur.

The sessions were held at the beautiful Felix Meritis (an old school?) but also in a room at the nearby hotel Dylan, a really beautiful room, all white with a big softly lit sculptured wall. Four parallel sessions made it easy to find sessions that interested everyone but hard to choose. The lineup of speakers was really good and the topics covered a broad range from art and inspiration to hard tech talks. In focus were the new features of Flash CS5 and Flash player 10.1, the iPhone export and the multitouch capabilities but also Unity got a lot of attention.

Adobe let us see a sneak peek on Flash CS5 and talked about how the open screen project made it possible for flash player 10.1 and Air 2.0 to run on a large number of devices. It was fun to see Flash running on the Nexus One and other devices such as netbooks and a new prototype from Nvidia. Adobe also talked about how they continuously work on the flash players performance and how they have a dialogue with the flash community. They showed two impressing demos from the Away team. A fighter jet with high poly count and multiple light sources and a Quake style demo that was really smooth.

Mario Klingemann talked about math, patterns in life and his quest to find patterns not yet discovered. He also showed how he managed to send the portrait of Mona Lisa in a single tweet, 140 characters.

Grant Skinner and Mike Chambers both had a lot of tips and tricks up their sleeves about optimizing the code to get a better performance.

Erik Natzke spoke about his way from mega-timeline-tweening to coding his own tools to be able to make his amazing artwork.

Jared Tarbell talked about finding patterns in images and his experiments trying to make unexpected things to occur in his work. He had a lot of interesting samples of his work to show, both digital and analogue.

Frank Reitberger had a talk about the return of the blob. He showed some experiments with metaballs, one where he connected a pressure sensor to his computer and while shooting it with a water-gun he obtained cool effects in a flash 3D environment.

Wesley Grubbs from PitchInteractive held a very interesting session about information graphics. He talked about strategies for making information visible especially when dealing with very large amounts of data. http://www.pitchinteractive.com, http://www.devedeset.com/

The very inspiring Bartek Drozdz talked about his experiences of going from working with 3D in flash to using Unity. Unity seems to be quite easy to work with and we will see a lot of that in the future. http://www.everydayflash.com/

Ralph Hauwert held my favorite session talking about raytracing with Pixelbender filters. Lots of cool refereces to the demo scene and really good thoughts on optimizing and using Pixelbender. http://www.unitzeroone.com

Joa Ebert is always fun to watch, a real “mad scientist”, amazing what that guy can do, has he got 48 hours each day? Some fun insights on developing with Scala. I love it when he says things like “then its really easy, you can do anything…” and most of the audience hasn’t got a clue on what he just did. http://blog.joa-ebert.com/

Lee Brimelow talked about the new multitouch functionality in flash player 10.1. This is along with the iPhone export one of the most talked about features of the new flash player and it seems to work as you would expect it to. Some of it will be a bit tricky to implement though because of all the hardware and OS differences. The basic stuff seems to work in most cases. http://theflashblog.com/

Andre Michelle showed parts of the new version of Audiotool that he and Joa Ebert has been working on for the last two years. The performance of that is really impressive and Andre’s creativity when it comes to making visual interfaces for creating and manipulating sound is amazing. The new version will be released in a few weeks but If you haven’t tried the current version you really have to have a look at it. http://blog.andre-michelle.com/, http://www.hobnox.com/audiotool.1046.en.html

Chris Bird of United Visual Artists showed some nice installations and live stage visuals for bands like Massive Attack and U2. Massive use of LED, beautiful stuff. http://www.uva.co.uk/

Then our own David Eriksson finished off the conference with a talk that was very appreciated by the audience, really fun to see all that behind the scenes material from the Teamgeist project. We felt pretty proud sitting in the very front row when David had his talk about our way of life. Hats of for David! And we even got some goosebumps watching our showreel on the big screen. Great work everyone!

Amsterdam, we will be back!