Apple’s Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash – and my response

Steve Jobs posted a response to the whole Flash on iPad / iPhone / iPod issue, an excerpt:

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I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

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Tags: Apple, CNN, espn, Facebook, fart sounds, Flash, flash products, fox news, full web, h.264, iPad, iPhone, msnbc, optimal experience, rollovers, Steve Jobs, wall street journal, Youtube

Papervision Augmented Reality

In the 2008 presidential elections, CNN had some pretty “cheesy” special effects.  

CNN tried to involve “holograms” (they were far from holograms technically) into their live coverage.  In reality, it was mostly augmented reality that they were using.  Give them credit for trying something new.  It would have been nice for them not to say it was a hologram.  For the next 5 years people are going to see real holograms and say they saw CNN do it better in 2008.  

Boffswana (formerly Digital Pictures Interactive) has published the source code to a Papervision and Flash powered augmented reality.  

Papervision – Augmented Reality, lets you print out a symbol and place it on your desk.  When you start up the flash movie and let it access your video camera, you can move a 3d object around in the flash movie — augmented reality .. not a hologram — and see a 3d monster object move around as if he were on top of it.  

They provide source code and printouts.  How fun.

The project requires Papervision and FLARToolkit libraries.  

A video from there site is below:

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

Tags: Augmented Reality, Boffswana, CNN, FLARToolkit, Flash, hologram, Papervision