Innovating With Flash

Since starting for Boston Productions I have enjoyed being able to work with some of the most creative people I have met in my life. I moved to MA in order to pursue the dream of being able to get more involved in fusing Flash with the physical world and other technologies. Last week I had the pleasure of traveling down to The Hershey Story in Hershey, PA to help install some of the exhibits we have been working on for half a year. I will highlight the exhibits I helped work on and explain a little bit about the technology behind them.

Explore Hershey

This is a 5 projection screen, 4 touch screen based interactive that switches on a timed schedule between a huge network enabled flash application and a 5 screen video presentation about certain aspects of Hershey. This runs on five computers, an AMX control system, video playback hardware, and shares communication between all five computers and five serial input devices.

The flash interactive projects a map of Hershey, PA onto the center table. People can use the trackballs at each of the four stations to simultaneously pick up 3D buildings on the map and drag them to their user station, which prompts their touch-screen to become a 3D explorable interactive of the given building. The touchscreen interactive consists of over 2000 historical images and 12 3D environments of key points in Hershey, PA.

My boss, Bruce made the touchscreen and projection slideshows as well as the prototype map which allowed for interaction with one mouse and one building. I extended the prototype to allow for simultaneous interaction between 4(and potentially more in the future) mice using a c# application and socket connections. In order to do this, I created a 3-class stack that I refer to as "MultiMouse" which propagates events up the stack until they reach the main application(if they need to go there).

Powers Of Promotion


This exhibit was made by Bruce and I provided back end e-mail and upload capabilities for it. Users can view historical promotional material from Hershey and also design their own candy bar wrapper in a phtoshopesque design interface. When you are finished with a design, it is possible to upload the design to the HersheyStory.org website and e-mail yourself a unique link to the content.

There are more exhibits which have not been installed yet that I may elaborate on in the future. If you are ever in Hershey PA, I would recommend you visit "The Hershey Story, The Museum on Chocolate Avenue". It is a beautiful building and exhibit space.