Camera Snapshot Effect?

programming flash
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I was looking at one of Verizon’s Flash demos regarding their picture phones and there’s a portion where you can drag the phone over a horizontal scrolling menu and snap a picture of a portion of the scrolling image. It works really well and I’m curious as to how this might be done or if anyone knows of any tutorials that would lead me in the right direction. Here’s the link to the demo itself:

Verizon Picture Messaging Demo

My inital guess is that they’re using the masked area of the phone to determine 4 coordinates to create a boundary and somehow grabbing the background picture from that info but I’m not sure.

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Hi!
Okay, here’s the deal…When the lady’s talking about ‘capturing the moments with uncle whatever…’ move your mouse around. You will learn that each person in that panoramic picture are buttons. If the mouse isn’t on or near one of those people, the cursor goes from a hand to a arrow.

Something else I noticed is that if you try to take the picture of half of a person, the whole person shows up, therefore, there is only one picture for each person.

Putting the picture on the phone is easy. When you’re dragging the phone, you have a couple things going on. First, you hide the mouse


Mouse.hide();

Then, the camera-phone (I can’t believe we can say ‘cameraphone’ now!!) Has these actions:


onClipEvent(enterFrame){
this._x=_root._xmouse;
this._y=_root._ymouse;
}

Then when the phone travels over the people, your mouse is still registering which person’s button it’s over. In your phone, you would have an empty movieClip to load in an external jpeg (that’s how I would do it). On each of the people’s buttons, you’d have:


on(release){
_root.camera.loadMovie("unclepicture.jpg");
//providing 'camera' is the empty movieClip in the phone
}

Not really hard, but not to easy all the same. There’s a lot of techniques (sp?) used here, they can all be learned here at Kirupa!!
mouse:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash5/globalmousecursor.htm
load jpegs into movieClips:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/loading.htm#Loading%20.jpg%20dynamically%20with%20Flash%20MX:
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