From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

There were 6 bays total and each one highlighted areas of cultural interest in the city. We installed 3 touchscreens behind a glass bay that included an interactive fireworks display and served as an information kiosk for activities available at the arch grounds.

Here is a video that shows a little bit of the preparation and the finished product. It was a really fun project!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Flash Heatmap

There are some really good Flex based examples out there, but I wanted a pure AS3 option. I found Michael VanDaniker’s examples the most beautiful and easy to understand. So I pulled out what I could to just AS3. I also got some help from sunild. I manually convert pixel to lat / lng coordinates on each map move. There is probably a more efficient way to do this. But I’m going to put to rest AGAIN, tinkering w/ math that is way over my head!

Did you ever notice that if you try to navigateToURL() from inside Flash in Safari it will refresh the Flash on the page? Here is a quick work around

You need to setup a JavaScript function that uses the DOM to fidget w/ the window.location.hash. It looks something like this;

function mapAnchor(anchor)
{
window.location.hash = anchor;
}

Then from ActionScript setup a navigateToURL() like this;

var _anchorlink:URLRequest = new URLRequest("javascript:mapAnchor('"+anchorname+"')");

where anchorname is your anchor.

This is definitely a team effort. More when we roll out the beta.

So… I created a super-simple skinnable AS3 FLV player. It’s still got a few kinks, but might be a good starting point for anyone to add-on. Feel free to use as you see fit (pls don’t be a dick and try to go sell it somewhere).

Here is what it has:

• Play / Pause functionality
• Video Scrubbing
• Buffer display
• Jump To section

Here is what it does not have, but what could be extended w/ a little more effort:

• fullscreen
• time display
• sound controls

Link to AS3 Video Player Page
Download Assets

So, ideally there would be a setting for 480×720 with a 1.1 pixel aspect ratio. Unfortunately that doesn’t exist. I thought I’d share how I got the best results in respect to .9 pixels in NTSC.

Here are some tips:

1. Work in 480×720 square pixels.
2. Setup one master comp that has all your nested content in it. Set your master up for 720×480 with NTSC .9 pixels.
3. Rotate your content 90 degrees (You’ll still have some content handing over the edges)
4. Reduce the scale of your nested comp so that it is 90% height (which is really width now after rotation) and keep the 480 portion (the height in vertical mode) at 100% b/c NTSC only squishes the with width.
5. Now your content should line up with the NTSC height and width. It will look squished in After Effects, but if you have correct for pixel aspect ratio turned on it will look fine, and most importantly it will display correctly once you get it on a DVD and on a vertical television.

Side Note: Make sure you make TWO versions before you go test your DVD onsite, b/c you never know  how the monitor will be mounted. You could end up with upside down content if you guess wrong. Found that out the hard way:(

I’ve got some other projects in a similar vein that I will be trying out. They will all have a nature/animal theme, and they will be built with hand drawn elements positioned by code.