Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Cool TV ad for Virgin Trains titled “Success express”.

If you pay close attention you will only notice it’s “Final Countdown” (do you remember the hair metal band Europe?) playing in the background but that there’s also Sir Richard Branson, the flamboyant company’s boss, appearing somewhere in the ad. Can you see him?

It’s worth mentioning that this ad has been produced by London-based agency Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy who have a really cool site done in Flash.

Real-time face detection in Flash

Yes, you read it right… here’s some technical details:

• The underlying library is a AS3 library Marilena
• it is based on Intel’s OpenCV open-source face detection library
• more examples are available here

If you have a web cam handy, you can try out the demo as well. For some reason, I haven’t managed to make the demo work with my dumb Logitech webcam. Let me know if works for you.