MASTERPIECE: The Husband on a Leash
Imagine, coming back from your honeymoon and your husband is already waiting to be introduced to all of your colleagues.
How to…
1. Build physical replica of the husband
2. Code a face
Nothing simpler than this. Just:
Search for a good image of the husband (thanks LinkedIn) and cut out the mouth.
Record some sentences you want the husband to say.
Build an application that allows you to play the different mouth recordings to be played behind the image of the husband controlled by the mobile phone… phew… oke… NERD ON:
Let’s build a native app… well no - this will take too much time. It needs to work with simple websites.
Fortunately, the HTML for this is pretty simple: There's a layer for the face, which is always in the foreground. Behind it (properly positioned) is a stack of movies for the mouth. When a mouth (with the appropriate phrase) is selected to play, bring it to the first position of the stack and play it (stopping all other movies in the stack).
Now the complicated thing: how to control these stack changes? Thanks to Ruby on Rails and the included ActionCable module, its possible to update a given HTML page via websockets - with this it’s also possible to steer the stack with a little JavaScript. So let’s build a small admin interface and DONE.
Unfortunately… This only works on Android tablets. Safari on iOS is preventing to control videos from a script without the input of a human (clicking play). I learned, this is a prevention that suddenly some “bad advertisers” will start playing videos on a website.
NERD OFF
