Recently the “seam carving” technology to size images in a content aware way to preserve the original intention of the photo has been really taking off. In fact, Joa Ebert and Mario Klingemann, two flash geniuses have created and optimized [2] an AS3 algorithm for seam carving based on the paper about this new technology that was highlighted at 2007 SIGGRAPH.

• View the original first flash implementation of this at swieskowski
• View the source of the initial Joe Ebert AS3 Content Aware implementation
• View the demo of the initial Joe Ebert AS3 Content Aware implementation
• View the optimized source by Mario Klingemann
• View the demo of the optimized source by Mario Klingemann
• View the paper by Dr Ariel Shamir and Dr Shai Avidan
• View zero point nine’s quick and visual implementation (smaller images but fast)

Tinic Uro who works on the Flash player made some amazing announcements about the new beta flash player. Video is getting a major upgrade to the already pwning FLV format on the web, they are moving away from that however towards a H.264 standard format (can you say HD movies on your PC in Flash?). Silverlight (Windows Media VC-9), Quicktime and other formats were looking superior to FLV quality (although noone can beat the file size) but this has changed the game completely.

The people running the Flash product are just answering the calls of the market very effectively.

Some tidbits of what is possible with the new H.264 standard video in Flash:

• Playing content of other formats inside of Flash without worrying about loading another player or plug-in. (MPEG player or Quicktime movies for instance)
• Play HD video on your PC in Flash with support from video card manufacturers in the works.
• Play AAC SBR data instead of MP3, 5.1 channel surround sound.
• Use open source only tools for your complete video pipeline.

It seems Flash is determined to continue to lead video on the web

Who’s got the textures and cool chrome shiny 3d objects in Flash? There have been lots of materials work recently from papervision list developers and away3d developers (away3d is a branch of Papervision3D) and recently it is heating up a bit.

Early on on the papervision3D excitement, flash possibilities in 3d with AS3 specifically, much of that was due to 3d in flash but also the ability to texture and have bump mapping, toon rendering/cell shading and other neat effects like baked lighting, faked real-time lighting, video and movieclips on flash 3d objects and animated textures.

But when it comes to environmental mapping and true 3d reflection that might be simply stretching Flash to a limit that might require hardware acceleration but that isn’t stopping some.

I am not sure if environmental mapping will every be possible on a large scale without hardware acceleration. Pushing the limits could help influence Adobe to the market direction. But then again I never thought I would see the level of 3d in flash that we have and maybe in 2-3 years with multi-core processors it will be possible.

Here’s a snapshot of the current materials and environmental mapping (fake and real attempts).

UnitZeroOne first environment mapping /bump mapping:

Some toon renderings from UnitZeroOne

Recent work by mr doob

Wood

Metal

Weird

Weird 2

Recent work by actionscript architect

Perlin noise algorithm to animate texture real-time into water effect

More environmental mapping effects by the away3d materials developer Fabrice. Fabrice and the away3d developers are really taking off with the papervision3d core. I am seeing lots of engine limits tested and some great work at away3d.

Bumpy Meteor

Flat Lighting on bitmapMaterial

Chrome Ball (dont’ zoom in too far )

Did your processor melt yet?

I think that for games and flash effects faking it or real environmental mapping will have to be judged by what is needed for your purpose. I think that Flash player on software rendering can only go so far. So if you have real-time environmental reflections and surroundings it doesn’t always make your gameplay better and it won’t make your demo better if it means removing assets in other areas to make up for the performance drain of software rendering and the pressures it puts on the processor or browser plug-in.

You can still make really killer effects with baked animations, fake environmental mapping, faked dynamic real-time lighting and other effects. Flash, nor silverlight, will not be able to match hardware rendered shaders, per pixel lighting and physics anytime soon. But people are making good progress on this. I think it would be great if hardware acceleration were added to both Silverlight and Flash, with that, a brand new massive game market online, and it will be game on!

Grant Skinner has one upped the Flash CS3 AIR application export ability by adding a very useful panel to package Adobe AIR applications.

This is a pretty nice tool as usual from gskinner.  Be sure to check out the panel and all the installation info at Grant Skinner’s blog.

Download the AIRPanel zip file from here 

Adobe AIR apps are starting to pop up more. After the Grant Skinner AIR app for digg.com it appears Kevin Rose has launched pownce which is a twitter/email/friend/social sharing site/service. The desktop app for pownce.com is built with AIR. I believe AIR will really take off with these types of apps succeeding on it. Pownce is only alpha but it is hard to see it not being successful with the amount of digg users that will spill over.

Pownce (you have to be invited to private alpha)

Other apps for AIR so far that are usable and ready:

FineTune
Competitor to last.fm. I wonder how long til a last.fm air app.

Digg Desktop Widget (from Adobe sponsored digg API contest)

Other AIR apps can be viewed here including kuler, a twitter app and more. And also here at Rob Christensen’s blog.

merhl has created an Adobe AIR iPhone widget for using the AIR runtime that is pretty cool.  It only has some sample screens for most buttons in it but you can actually browse the web on it using the web browser and it flips sideways to show the screen flip.  Check out your website or blog on the desktop iPhone.  Get your AIR iPhone now!

merhl has made it auto updating with AIR so as he adds more functionality it will autoupdate.  That is one neat aspect of doing desktop app/widget work with flash and AS3 in AIR is that it is much more capable of syncing content and that content is usually extremely optimized for fast delivery and keeping it up to date.  Plus you can make chrome and shiny things with it.

Tinic Uro who works on the Flash machine recenty posted some great news to hopefully a new direction, possible hardware acceleration with the next Flash update! This is mainly for 2d drawing acceleration but Tinic also notes in his first point that this update improves the speed of Papervision3D (currently a fake 2d painters algorithm 3d).  Adobe is listening to the market on this one.

And what is this, OpenGL and DirectX hardware scaling? It helps to draw the full screen version faster since its more taxing on the processor probably but this will lead to further use of OpenGL and DirectX for 3d, I hope.

Full-screen mode with hardware scaling. Probably the biggest new feature in the Flash Player Update 3. This leverages DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on OSX. There is an new API to control the behavior which was required since we could not change current behavior and we wanted to give the maximum flexibility possible. I know you are probably eager to use this feature, we will post more information on this on labs.adobe.com soon. I’ll also will give you much more technical details in an upcoming blog post.

Found via Zeh. I have dreams of hardware acceleration in flash and what it will do to the gaming world. Microsoft has Silverlight which they could easily make DirectX capable and might as well at such low penetration rates right now, but they would stop at switching to OpenGL I think for cross platform support.  Adobe might be willing to risk it and since they already own Director, roll in OpenGL engine support into Flash and win the 3d web battle not to mention just entirely take 2d effects and animation to a new level as well.

UPDATE: Here is Tinic showing the 1080 video with nhardware acceleration in the new update. Anyone with >2 screens at work, they get stuff done.

http://video.onflex.org/2007/06/14/tinic-uro-shows-new-fullscreen-hd-video-in-flash-player/

Adobe is throwing down $100 million in venture funding to companies developing tools with Apollo. Or more specifically the “Engagement Platform“ Is Adobe serious about making Apollo successful? I would say yes.  It is both an excellent PR move and it shows their dedication to making desktop as proliferated at Flash on the web.

Microsoft is already using companies to push the Silverlight technology who are known partners and to direct competition with Flash and Apollo with WPF/Silverlight. Although Apollo is a cross platform desktop application wrapper for Flash its more than Microsoft currently has and blows away widget libraries of today.

Here’s a snippet from Niall Kennedy 

Adobe has allocated $100 million towards investing in companies that enhance its engagement platform and is especially interested in funding Apollo companies. As of last month Adobe had invested in 6 companies, including word processing company Virtual Ubiquity. Companies might develop for Apollo to take advantage a strategic investment from Adobe at reasonable terms.

Apollo in its current form seems overhyped, but the cross platform development space will definitely look different in a year as we see new toolkits from big companies executed inside and outside of the browser. It’s not too difficult for a web application to pop out of the web browser and into a standalone web technology, and the marketing and investment dollars being spent by large companies such as Adobe and Microsoft should help boost the visibility of cutting edge web apps.

This was announced at MAX the Apollo/Flash9/AS3 funding effort.  There were lots of interesting things going on in the vector app space and direct to browser desktop apps.  Ray Ozzie added his points about the future of desktop apps in that winforms apps are dead…

[source]

Adobe is in the process of Open Sourcing Flex Under the Mozilla Public License (Mozilla Public License FAQ: http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/mpl-faq.html )

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser – on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.

The timeline to do so will be by the end of 2007.

The source code for the Flex framework is already available within the free distribution of the current Flex 2 SDK. By this summer, Adobe plans to put in place most of the infrastructure (public bug database and public daily builds) required to run the Flex SDK as an open source project. We expect to complete the transition to a fully open source project (source code for the compiler, infrastructure for community contributions, etc.) by the end of 2007.

This is pretty interesting in that it will lead to more applications challenging FlexBuilder but I imagine its largely to get around Open Sourcing Flash altogether.  They will never do that.  But some think that if Adobe were to do this that it would make flash more accepted as an application bulding tool. 

Silverlight Incoming! Flank ‘em

However you might see more backing of Flex.  I know many Flash developers and designers but not many are raving about Flex just yet. In fact its a bit of a confused strategy. It needs more support and this is a very good tactical move.

This is Flex trying to still get in the game

The reality is Flex is not really a player right now.  Flash is the best for interactives, games, learning systems, etc and it completely OWNs online video.  Director owns 3d games on the web.  And .NET, Java, PHP, Rails, Python etc own the web and enterprise.  That is just the state of the industry today. Flex isn’t a top choice right now.

Vector based to be more accepted?

With WPF entering and Flex possibly gaining more ground then vector based desktop apps and websites will be the norm maybe one day, but Adobe and former Macromedia’s sites aren’t even flash or flex.  Its more about applications and as the web becomes even more of a platform for that more trusted than even your own hard drive this may change.  The thing is people like to read content on textual systems like HTML. Vector based RIAs just do not do text correctly yet.  All text should be selectable and able to be searched and copied. Many systems have dual content systems to be indexable but teh text in the flash also needs to be selectable. The closer the usability and readable content in flash comes along maybe this will change.  Vector based interfaces are great for visual and advertising mediums but for most content its not there yet. Flex is starting to bring this in with better HTML support but I think that this move to open source was important to save a falling off initiative or one that had a bit of lag due to the switch from Macromedia to Adobe.  I am still wondering what happened to Director in that hand off.

Today Adobe released the official flash saturation numbers and it’s at 85%, which is safe to go to market with commercial projects. Its been a month since these numbers were ran and anything launching probably in June will be at a 90% penetration rate. Getting tired of upkeeping and working on AS2 libraries, its time for AS3.

Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration

Notes

1. Does not include Flash Player 5 and Emerging Markets.
2. Supports Adobe Flash Video (FLV).

[source]