I was recently browsing through the SWFs and FLAs I’ve collected over the last few years because I thought they were interesting or unique. During my reminiscing, I stumbled on this vein-1 experiment by Mike Johnson from May 2002.

It caught my eye, and I decided to rebuild it in OOP, and spice it up a bit. I wanted to make it look like an old anatomy textbook come to life. My fiance thinks it’s creepy, so I must have done ok – judge for yourself though, the result is below (warning: it’s fairly CPU intensive, and requires FP7).

I’ll be releasing the code to this once I’ve cleaned it up a bit. I’ll also be talking a bit about how it came together at my upcoming conference sessions.

Also, to give credit where due, the original experiment by Mike was part of a 25 lines experiment. I’ve nearly doubled that for the Vein itself, and then nearly doubled it again to add camera motion, grids, and labels.

UPDATE: The source code for this experiment is available here.

I’m going to be at a fair number of conferences over the next few months, so I thought I’d write up a quick entry to let people know where I’d be and when I’d be there (and to help me remember dates and places).

Feb 17-18: MXDU, Sydney Australia

March 9-11: FlashEurope, Barcelona Spain

April 6-8: Flashforward, San Francisco USA

April 9-11: FlashInTheCan, Toronto Canada

I’m running the same session at all 4 conferences (trying to preserve my sanity this year). The session is called “Object Oriented Procrastination”, and it has been very well received thus far. The description is something to the effect of:

Object Oriented Programming is commonly associated with application development (boring but profitable), but it can also be used to create less practical (and much more entertaining) pieces. This session examines the inspiration, architecture and code of a number of Grant’s recent multimedia experiments. Designers and Flash newcomers will be introduced to the basics of OOP and programmatic motion in ActionScript 2, while more experienced coders will learn architectural best-practices and hopefully be inspired to use their skills for more creative pursuits.

Don’t worry, I’m not a complete slacker (yet). I’m already working on a brand new session for conferences coming after those four (debuting in FFNYC perhaps).

I’m looking forwards getting together with all the regular Flash gang (you know who you are), and meeting up with some new people. Conferences are always a blast – and once in a while I even learn something new (when I slide out of my drunken haze long enough). I hope to see you there!