FITC regular Colin Moock started off his session discussing how he first got interested in multiuser applications as a child through video games. From very basic Atari games where high scores were recorded by taking pictures of the television screen and sending them into Atari to 3D multiuser first person shooters like Quake to modern multiuser games like Big Little Planet. Moock mentioned that 5 years ago at FITC he declared it was the beginning of the "Multiuser Era", but it's taken until now for it to really happen. Back in 2004 he mentioned how everything should be multiuser, that an app that was not multiuser would be like a computer without the internet. Colin mentioned that back in 2004 he mentioned that even Word should be multiuser and most people went "huh", yet today multiuser document editors such as Google Docs are growing in popularity.

Colin Moock is off to pursue this dream of increasingly more multiuser applications by announcing a new company that he was co-founding with Derek Clayton "User1 Subsystems Corporation".

Colin then announced his new company's first product, a multiuser user application server called the "Union Platform".

Colin demoed how easy it is to put together a multiuser chat by programming it right then with less than 60 lines of code just 8 minutes. Then Derek talked about the server side and how programmers could develop for it.

Colin thinks this is the beginning of what he calls the "Universal Controller Era" (tricorder Colin mumbles to the amusement of the audience). Where we soon will see any phone be able to connect to any device.

Union has already been working with a company called MegaPhone. Colin showed an video of people playing a game on a billboard using their telephone, having called in a number. The audience got involved as those with an internet connection played two demo games.

So quite the interesting set of announcements of from Colin Moock.

For more on the Union Platform check out unionplatform.com.

Tags: FITC, FITC Toronto, FITC Toronto 2009, Colin Moock, multiuser

Kicking off the first round of sessions Monday morning was Thomas Schroecker and Hubert Bandurski presenting on managing content for websites. They focused a lot on their own custom system, with their template classes and database, something that a company would have to spend a lot of resources to reproduce. However, they did have some good pratices, such as producing a skellington website that displays just the content without design. This as a good way in managing the client and getting them to sign off on the content before the design layer is added on. They also focused on separating the presentation layer from the content layer, so that multiple versions of the website can be made, with the same content for a variety of devices, which they see will be happening more. They mention that they think we will be seening fewer isolated websites at a single address, but more websites integrated into other parts of the web such a various social media websites and blogs.

Tags: FITC, FITC Toronto, CMS

"Lets push this further..." Dr. Woohoo repeated many times during his very inspiring session at FITC Toronto. Through out the session he was definitely pushing things into interesting directions, getting various applications communicating to each other and taking the audience step by step through examples showing his process of how he ended up where he has.

He showed examples of communication between custom buikd SWF files in a Photoshop CS4 panel to create custom artwork. He had worked with examples of Keith Peter's "Making Things Move" ActionScript animation book to randomly create paths in Photoshop. Also Dr. Woohoo in responding to an audience question mentioned that communication is not just limited to the SWF sending commands to Photoshop, as you can actually listen to Photoshop events and react to them in the SWF.

He also showed an example of communication between CS4 applications using Adobe's Switchboard. When greeted with a strange Illustrator error, he mentions "That's cool" to the amused audience as he mentions that he loves breaking stuff.

Beyond just Adobe applications, he showed a lot of work he's been doing by combining OpenFrameworks with Maya creating randomized images in 3D space. He would use various libraries in the open source OpenFrameworks and then create a socket connection to Maya to send it properties and even dynamically create MalScript files. After creating these abstract shapes he was applying strokes and filters to create interesting pieces of 2D artwork.

Always looking for different sources for the abstract art, he had an example of a webcam, with facial recorgnition that tracked him as he moved around sending that information to Maya to create 3D artwork.

Here's a cool video from the session where the source of 3D objects is music and he shows as he's able to change the properties of the object in real time, changing the colour and other properties.

One of his inspirations was watching glass blowers which he brought into his digital work by creating random cylinder objects with the microphone providing the random data. So he was actually able to blow into his microphone and create these cylinder shapes. Continuing again one step further, he used music to generate these objects, as seen in the video bellow:

Anyone interested in seeing some of the end results of his artwork check out Dr. Woohoo's blog.

Tags: FITC, FITC Toronto, Dr. Woohoo, Maya