Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality.
The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, like for example sports scores on TV during a match.

In this article we’ll use the Adobe Collaboration Service components (codeName : CoCoMo) to develop a simple eLearning platform with following features:
1) WebCam
2) Audio on/off
3) User List
4) Text Chat
5) Shared notes
6) Shared whiteboard

The company i’m working for, GnStudio, released Na.Bi.Ro, an open source Flex framework that provides a lot of classes to help Flex developers in their daily work.
WHY DID WE CREATE NABIRO?
There are two main reasons:
1) When you are working on enterprise projects with a medium/big team you have to define some guidelines and methodologies that all developers need to follow to create flexible and maintainable projects and to avoid to lose the right way.

Reading RSS feeds from Flex or Flash often generate some security issues when the origin domain doesn’t contain a crossdomain.xml file to manage the policy settings.
A little workaround is create a PHP proxy to read the feeds and pass the content to the Flex script.

A lot of Flex components support the itemRenderer property, to customize their item layout.
In this article we’ll use the List component to display the RSS Actionscript.it Last 5 Tutorial content and we’ll define 3 itemRenderers to switch 3 different content views at runtime.

Test online demo

In this sample we’ll use the Flex HTTPService class to make a PHP call and get the file list from a webserver folder. Then we’ll display them populating a List component and we’ll enable the mouse click on each item to save them on your disk (using FileReference.download() method)

Try the online demo

As often happens, i got the expiration to write this little post after an user request from an actionscript.it forum.
In few words, user asked how integrate a Google Search inside its Flex application to display the result always inside the flash app.
So I started to surf around the web to find a valid solution, and after founding many PHP solutions I found a cool AS3 library, developed by Boulevart.
This API provides a lot of classes to connect Flex (and Flash too) to Google services (Google Search, Translation, News, and so …

In this post I’ll show you how to create a form with a file attachment using Flash CS3/4, ActionScript 3.0 and PHP. The trick is use the FileReference class to upload a file from your own hard disk and at the same time send the input- field values.

I’m really happy to see that in Flash Builder 4, the next release of Flex out in spring 2010, a complete video player component will be finally available with a lot of integrated features: play/pause, progress bar, time and fullScreen button too.

See it in action (click on buttons to play videos)

In this sample, full-commented, we’ll use the FlashPlayer 10 3D features to display a list of Video Thumbnails enabling the Mouse Click Event to enlarge them changing their z and rotationY properties.
We’ll use Caurina Tween to perform 3d animations, so download them and copy the caurina package in your project folder before test this sample (they are not included inside the source files)