Face Detection: Here is the sample included with Marilena showing facial detection on an image.

Lots of recent action has blown up on this front from Mr doob, quasimondo (optimizing the Marilena classes for better performance) and Boffwswana. Also there is a kit called deface by sshipman that is the first foray into this a year ago doing similar things but it was just a bit before it’s time and a bit slow in previous versions of flash, it performs decent now in this sample. Flash 10 performance of the AVM2 and future directions with Alchemy will lead to more interesting stuff just like this.

Mr. doob head tracking sample, be sure to check lots of other examples there

Boffswana example of head tracking Johnny Lee Wii style with only a webcam and flash, no wiimote needed since it uses facial detection to check where you are and how close you are in the screen and then moves accordingly.

This is stemming from the recent explosion of the FLARToolkit and augmented reality in flash as well as the gimmicks used by Nintendo with the wii and Johnny Lee’s great head tracking advancements. Porting great libraries to flash seems to be the phase we are entering now judging by the recent excitement around Adobe Alchemy and the LLVM along with the lead from the libspark.org contributors. We have also seen this heavily last year in ports of Box2D for 2d physics and other toolkits using established working code and porting that to flash now that is is mostly capable of handling the performance.

OpenCV (Open Computer Vision Library by Intel) is quite a powerful platform that allows you to do all this and now it is available in flash. There are other great libraries for nearly all platforms now. I have done some previous work with Aforge which is also a port of OpenCV mainly for motion detection. This was always around but not until the recent performance updates and the innovation that has come with Alchemy and the thinking that goes along with that (porting in libraries to flash from C/C++ etc), has allowed this to flourish in flash and thus the web.

The amazing new things we can do with flash by porting in existing libraries is only going to get more intense as alchemy and flash 10 are even more mainstream.  It is almost as if Flash will eventually just become a web renderer and simplified front end to many great toolkits that exist in more native environments like C/C++ but with the speed and distribution access of the web with Flash.  Exciting times ahead.

Mihai Pricope has a post with sources on how he got the ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) a great open source physics engine for 3D, running on the AVM2 Flash Player virtual machine.

I’ve took Alchemy for a test and decided to compile ODE (Open Dynamic Engine). Just to add yet another physics engine to the Flash World. It was a hell of a ride but I finally got to produce some bouncing balls . For a still unknown reason some as 3d libraries have been very slow to render 6 translucent walls and 2 balls. Papervision3D seems to move quite decent.

You can download the ode sources from here. To recompile them do (you need to have the Alchemy environment turned on):

Flash 10 will become mainstream shortly and with that the possibilities of using Alchemy in your projects is becoming a reality for production.  But what specifically can you do with Alchemy, a project that helps to compile C/C++ code into AVM2 capable files?

Alchemy described from Adobe:

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

Alchemy is based on the LLVM Low Level Virtual Machine that allows new levels of code translation.  Maybe this can lead to more effective and performing code to run on the iPhone with flash player 10. Or some type of system that allows flash developers to code in AS3 or take projects and get them ready to run on the iPhone much like some of the Java to Cocoa compilation systems and Unity3D using mono to compile down to iPhone capable code.

The latest haXe file format library contains complete support to read and write PBJ file, enabling you to write Pixel Bender assembler directly in haXe, then compile it on-the-fly into PBJ bytes, which can then be saved on disk or loaded directly in Flash.

I plan to have much more on Pixel Bender (shaders in flash) and Adobe Alchemy (compile other languages to which is a very cool technology that involves LLVM that Nicolas also has lots of great input on.