remote
     synthesis

Brass Monkey SDK for Flash, Android, iOS - FITC Mobile Interview

Posted on Sep 21, 2010

Of all the cool things at FITC Mobile in Toronto this year, the presentation and product that had me the most impressed (and had my mind reeling with ideas for applications) was the Brass Monkey SDK which was presented by Chris Allen. Created by Infrared5, the company that brought you the Star Wars Trench Run game for the iPhone/iPod, Brass Monkey can turn any smart phone running iOS or Android into a motion and touch controller for controlling your Flash, Flex or Unity3D game online. You can use multiple phones connected to the same game and all being able to interact with it using the multitouch and accelerometer inputs as well as custom events that can be passed.

If you want to see Brass Monkey in action, you can try it via the Star Wars Trench Run game on StarWars.com (although you will need a copy of Trench Run on your iPhone/iPod for it to work) but you can also see it in action in the video below. The system works over Wifi (though Chris mentioned potentially adding Bluetooth support as a failover) and uses TCP and UDP to pass events from the devices to the game or application that is designed to receive them (Chris mentioned that they use UDP when available since it is better for accelerometer type data). During his presentation, Chris showed an example where he had two devices, one Android and one iOS connected to a drawing application built in Flex - you can see the application in action in the video below.

Chris Allen - BrassMonkey Interview from Brian Rinaldi on Vimeo.

The coolest thing about Brass Monkey in my mind is the potential to not only connect multiple devices that run various incompatible operating systems to an application on the web (I assume you could also connect to a desktop application, such as one built in AIR) but also the potential to communicate from device to device. I am also investigating whether this can be used for creating Android applications using AIR for Android and hope to post about that soon. Much of the examples that have been created so far are games or marketing but I can see any number of business applications for this now that both wireless and smartphones are becoming ubiquitous.

If you are interested in learning more about Brass Monkey, check out http://brassmonkey.infrared5.com/.

Comments

Very cool, I've seen a few videos where smartphones were being used as controlleresque devices and I love the idea. But I like that an SDK has been developed based the idea more.

Posted By derek knox / Posted on 09/22/2010 at 8:53 AM

Hi Derek. Wondering If I could get a copy of this interview with Chris for use on our facebook page.
Thanks,

Mani
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brass-Monkey-SDK/147325535311645?v=wall

Posted By Mani / Posted on 11/14/2010 at 9:13 AM