Ira's website

Chris Allen, CEO & President of Infrared5, gave an intriguing demonstration of Brass Monkey (http://brassmonkey.infrared5.com), a software library that turns any iPhone into a wifi controller akin to a Wii. Dominick Accattato, CTO of Infrared5 and BostonFUG board member, was also present. Chris gave a brief intro to Infrared5 (www.infrared5.com) and his involvement in the Red5 Open Source Flash Media Server (http://osflash.org/red5). From there he moved to a quick discussion of platforms (along with a hilarious picture of platform shoes), specifically mobile platforms and the Adobe Flash Openscreen project which has Flash everywhere, except iPhone.

So, Infrared5 was working on an iPhone game for the Star Wars folks and turned to using Unity3d to save time and to produce a better gaming experience. Unity 3d is a game engine which has been ported to multiple platforms including iPhone. Infrared5 built the Star Wars "Trench Run" game for iPhone using Unity3D and later built a website-based game (as in play in your desktop browser), also leveraging Unity3D. Trench Run is a kind of old school (aka arcade) gaming experience with up to date graphics. Then they though about what can we do to take it to the next level? Idea! Use the iPhone as a game controller for cross-platform games.

The Brass Monkey name came kinda randomly while working on names (thought of the old Beastie boys song). Attendees then got some Brass monkey Demo time Controller has 10-30 millisecond response time over wifi. People played with the controller. Consensus was gaming experience was good. In the website-based Star Wars game, users can play with mouse or can purchase the upgrade to the iPhone app to enable it as a Brass Monkey wifi controller. Might grandfather in some purchasers of the Star Wars iPhone game.

We then got a demo of using iPhoneOS devices in a browser flash app (not Air). Multiple devices were able to draw on a virtual table in the browser. The implications for multi-user was not lost on the group. This approach uses a registration server to identify devices's that are available to the app. The Brass Monkey clients and Flash app connect directly via this list. Algorithm uses some combination of public IP and device ID to accomplish a unique point to point connection between device and game.

Infrared5, in the near future, will provide an infrastructure or protocol for the server & application discovery. Product is still beta. IR5 is working on security models for the technology before releasing it.

Then we jumped into some AS3 code to use Brassmonkey- It has a device manager class. Using it is roughly like this: Create listeners for device manager events. Built-in events are: devices discovered, connected device, device disconnected. Once device is connected, setup listeners for looking for touches, acceleration, shaking events. There is also a library with an interface for setting up custom data and events, but we did not look at that.

IR5 plans to offer this as a library to developers for fee on the following platforms:

• iPhone
• AS3 (Flash)
• Unity 3d
• Android

We had a brief discussion of other applications: games, club/party lighting, interactive billboards/ads, medical, video, news, financial. Chris commented that he really likes Unity3d for virtual world gaming development. Some of his reasons include: Unity 3D has great plug-in architecture (no browser restart), accelerated 3D graphics, import of graphics assets and real-time rendering of 3D motion in toolset. It uses Mono which is open sourced C#, and has scripting languages that are very similar to ActionScript (google "unity script" and "Unity3D Boo"). Unity 3d apps can also run on Wii.

Chris & Dominick let folks play unreleased screens from upcoming versions of the Star Wars game.

iPhone Star Wars Trench Run is available in iTunes App Store now. Star Wars Trench Run on the web is available now at starwars.com Brassmonkey will become available for developers in May 2010.

For more info, watch their website for news at http://infrared5.com