Chathuranga Warnakula: August 2006

Thursday, August 31, 2006

How to pause the timeline in flash

Just copy da code below and paste it where you want to pause on the timeline...no more stretching out the timeline to gain time and adding mroe kilo bites to your movie!

// Set the following two values for how long you want to
// loop, and how many frames to loop:
pauseDuration = 5*1000;
framesInLoop = 10;
if (startTime == null) {
startTime = getTimer();
gotoAndPlay (_currentframe-framesInLoop);
} else {
lapsedTime = getTimer()-startTime;
if (lapsedTime < pauseDuration) {
gotoAndPlay (_currentframe-framesInLoop);
} else {
startTime = null;
}
}

Friday, August 25, 2006

For all you multimedia ppl out there

These are some randoms out from this cool pdf i found

When watching images or video, we focus on particular areas of the scene. We do not scan a scene in raster fashion; instead, our visual attention tends to jump from one point to another. These so-called saccades are driven by a fixation mechanism, which directs our eyes towards objects of interest
Studies have shown that the direction of gaze is not completely idiosyncratic to individual viewers. Instead, a significant number of viewers will focus on the same regions of a scene
“we do not see, we look” .. We focus our visual attention according to task at hand and the scene content. The reason why this behavior should be taken into account in video encoding and quality assessment is that our visual acuity is not uniform across the entire visual field.
People and especially faces are among the objects attracting the most attention.. If there are faces of people in a scene, we will look at them immediately. Furthermore, because of our familiarity with people’s faces, we are very sensitive to distortions or artifacts occurring in them. People in the picture and their facial expressions are among the most important criteria for image selection.
Research in the field of olfaction is limited, as there is no consistent method of testing user capability of smell. The first smell-based multimedia environment (sensorama) was developed by Heilig (1962, 1992), which simulated a motorcycle ride through New York and included colour 3D visual stimuli, stereo sound, aroma, and tactile impacts (wind from fans, and a seat that vibrated).
Historically, emotions were considered irrational, but are now seen as important for human development, in social relationships and higher-order thinking such as cognition, reasoning, problem solving, motivation, consciousness, memory, learning, and creativity