Tag Archives: flartoolkit

Adobe on the Gartner Hype Cycle 2009

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Gartner recently released its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies and ReadWriteWeb has some good analysis. For those who aren’t familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle , it’s essentially a map of technologies over five phases. Those phases correspond with the value of a particular technology. As you would imagine, technologies start off very exciting with a ton of hype. As reality sets in, the hype dies down, and people end up underestimating the technology (this is the Trough of Disillusionment). Finally people start to figure out both the true value of a technology and how to use it effectively and it enters the Plateau of Productivity.

I’ve always thought the Flash Platform provided the best way to experiment with emerging technologies and provided companies with a widespread distribution on which to experiment and test these technologies. Our community also has the most cutting edge and creative developers, so Flash has a built in advantage that you guys just try things first. As a result, I’ve always tracked this particular Hype Cycle to plot it against the Flash community’s interests. I’ve mapped out the hype cycle below and then explained in detail which technologies relate to projects or capabilities of the Flash Platform

gartner_hype_adobe

  • Video Search – This is something we’ve been working on for a while. The latest version of Flash Media Server supports adding searchable metadata to live streams so you can make live video searchable.
  • Surface Computers – Surface computing is all about the multi-touch. We’ve got you covered with Flash.
  • Augmented Reality – The guys over at Spark have been doing this for a while with their port of the FLARToolkit. And we’re seeing a lot of examples of augmented reality and Flash.
  • Internet TV – This can mean a bunch of different things, but I take it to mean Internet-connected TVs (of course just Internet TV like Hulu is also covered by Flash). While Adobe isn’t in the TV hardware business, we are working on Flash Player for television sets with our Digital Home initiative. That means Flash Platform developers can target these Internet-connected TVs.
  • E-Book Readers – We’re not working on our own eBook Reader, but the EPUB format is becoming an eBook standard for consuming digital book content. And we’ve got software like Digital Editions, a desktop eBook Reader.
  • Video Telepresence – arguably not the most cutting edge, but Gartner predicts that video telepresence will cost the travel industry $3.5 billion annually by 2012 and Adobe Connect is a slick little product that does a lot and works everywhere the Flash Player is installed.
  • Online Video – Hopefully this one doesn’t need any backup. Flash IS video on the web.
  • Public Virtual Worlds – A bit of a stretch but Flash is powering a number of virtual worlds including SmallWorlds and AllGirlArcade’s Spark City. The collaboration feature, interactivity, and runtime proliferation make the Flash Platform a pretty good place to deploy virtual worlds.
  • SOA – LiveCycle ES is all about SOA and it makes it easy for companies to integrate existing systems and leverage them as services.

What’s interesting is that most of what I perceived as being tied to the Flash Platform in some way is all at the left side of the curve, in the areas of huge hype or in the middle of the Trough of Disillusionment. On the bright side, the timeframe for most of these technologies to hit the mainstream is in the 2-10 year mark. That seems like an eternity in the technology industry, but it means you can get the first mover advantage as these technologies hit the Plateau of Productivity.

Getting Started with Augmented Reality and the Flash Platform

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ryan_flarHopefully by now you’ve all seen this augmented reality example by GE with an explanation here of how it works. It’s using the FLARToolKit by the ever-awesome Saqoosha who I interviewed while I was over in Japan for MAX Japan. It’s really cool stuff.

I spent a chunk of the weekend playing with it and I was impressed with just how easy it is so wanted to make sure that anyone who saw the demo realized that it’s super simple to get started. The first thing you need to do is check out Saqoosha’s Start-up guide for FLARToolkit (in English) which shows you exactly what you need to do and includes sample files. He basically goes through exactly which parts you need to change and what gets altered. I’m in the process of trying to get Gumbonents to work with Papervision3d so I can pop up live, interactive Flex components with FLAR.

Another thing I found helpful was an ARToolKit maker which helps you make the shapes that are required for FLAR to create visualizations. With those two links you should be able to start creating your own augmented reality demos in no time.

I’ve also got a Flex project which is based on Saqoosha’s demo code that you can download if you want. I basically just took his AS3 classes and combined them into one project because I didn’t want to use the fla file. Update: There is also a WAY more impressive project that Saqoosha created and showed at MAX 2009. You can grab everything you need on his blog. Saqoosha is the man!

Awesome Flash Demo from Japan

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I had a great time seeing everyone at MAX Japan and our pre-event went really, really well. At the pre-event I got to see a demo of the FLARToolKit, another awesome library which is part of the Spark Project. It’s basically a shape recognition library that you can use in conjunction with the video camera. Check out the demo. Thanks to Saqoosha for showing it off (and creating the library)!


FLARToolKit Demo from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.