One of the overall themes that seems to be coming through (or that I'm latching onto the most) at this year's New York Flash Forward is Flash and interacting with the physical world.
Rob Hall presented on "Kiosks and Interactive Exhibits." He has extensive experience in this area and presented some of the very cool things that he's had the opportunity to work on. He demonstrated a Flash-based coin counting machine available in certain banks. Additionally, he had two very cool sample applications. One was a magnetic-strip scanner that connected to his computer via the USB port. He ran his driver's license through the scanner and, via Flash, communicated with a web service to pull down information about the license scanned. The beauty of this is that the magnetic strip had a "Keyboard Wedge" driver that simulated a keyboard pressing the numbers that were scanned from the magnetic strip. Flash was able to read the information from the scanner via a simple onKeyDown method - Flash had no idea the data was coming from the scanner because it looked exactly like a keyboard. The other example application Rob showed was a barcode scanner. Again, it connected via USB and simulated keypresses whenever a barcode was read in.
Branden Hall demonstrated some very cool stuff that he's done recently with an I-PAC. He built floor tiles that could be connected together via ethernet jacks, plugged into the I-PAC, and then read by the computer as keyborad presses (acting just like buttons). Then, he fired up a Flash movie with ladybugs running around the screen with some squares lined up in the background. He ran across the stage stepping on the tiles, and any ladybug that was in the square on the screen corresponding to the square on the floor that he stepped on went splat. Think dance dance revolution, but all done in Flash. Very amazing and inspirational.
Making Things have an exhibit set up that is just downright cool. In Flash, you can leverage the ActionScript 2 class libraries they provide to do some awesome things with sensors and servos and such that you can plug into a board that interfaces with your computer. This is one of those things that you need to see because words don't do it justice.
Branden showed using Making Thing's Teleo to build a Flash interface for controlling a remote control car, and another for playing a game of pong with old-school joysticks as well. Very fun, cool stuff.
Something similar was Ze Frank's interactive frog. This is a fun little piece that takes input from a microphone and animates the mouth of a frog. If you get a chance, check it out and have some fun with it.
Not demonstrated at the conference, but still worthy noting, are phidgets and Marcos Weskamp's experiments with them.
Also, see GalaxyGoo's entry on this topic and Flash Magazine's Making Things piece.
