Dancing Robots, a Flash Emulator, and a COVID-19 Flight Path Drawing

The dancing robots presented by Boston Dynamics were both fascinating and scary. Also eye-catching was  the record of a flight by a pilot in Germany who flew a plane along a carefully planned course that sketched out a giant syringe on the flight recorder, like a hi-tech etch-a-sketch. The image seems fitting to the end of this year, with Covid-19 vaccinations becoming available to more and more people around the globe.

The flight took about an hour and the entire syringe was drawn at 5,000 feet. Not your traditional sky writing for sure. Check out Flight Radar for more details including a flight playback

In 2021, Flash animations will no longer be supported by the major browsers. For many artists who adopted the animation platform for their work, this means that their work will no longer be easily available to most viewers.

Fortunately,  an open source collective created ruffle, a flash emulator written in Rust. It provides a straight forward way to present existing flash content in a player that complies with today’s browser standards.

We decided to give ruffle a try and installed it on a few archive pages of digitalsouls.com to see how well it works. The installation requires some coding and/or webmastering skills, but the initial results are very good. (Let us know if you need help installing ruffle on your site.)

We used ruffle to bring back the flash animated menu on my H-Ray Heine page and one of my favorite projects: thought generator v.2.3. The flash animations for both pages were originally coded in 2000. It still looks good, doesn’t it?

Screenshot: Thought Generator v.2.3 – H-Ray Heine, 2000

Finally, there were Boston Dynamics dancing robots, welcoming the new year with precision and mechanical grace.

Happy New Year from all of us at digitalsouls.com. Let’s make it a good one for all!

With Aloha,

Artist, philosopher, social impact entrepreneur. Editor of DIGITALSOULS.COM.
Visit https://hrayheine.com for more information

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