Check. This. Out!

Wouter Verweirder (lector at HOWEST in Kortrijk, Belgium, Adobe Education Leader and wizard owner of/consultant at Happy Banana) recently released an extension for AIR that allows you to use Microsoft’s Kinect sensordata in your AIR applications. To showcase the power of this he just released this video where he’s actually controlling a 3D model (rendered with Away3D on Stage3D in AIR) with his own movements. Pure gold! Can you imagine the possibilities?

Keep an eye on http://muscle-jump.com/

The Flash and Unity communities are buzzing about a sneak peek that was posted on the Unity blog. And for good reason! The Unity team is doing some amazing work utilizing the new Stage 3D (formerly known as Molehill) APIs available in Flash Player 11 (currently in beta on Adobe Labs). The blog post on Unity’s blog was so popular that it crashed their server earlier today ;-) But now that it’s back up you just have to check it out!

Unity is also organizing a Flash Day during their Unite conference in September. If you happen to be in the San Francisco area on September 27 I’d suggest you book your seat today. The Unity Flash Day is a free event but registration is required. Hope to see you there! Flash on!

New toys goooood ;-)
If you’re anything like me you’ve probably already downloaded the new Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 betas from Labs. If not… Do so now! I know I’ve said this many times before but I’ll repeat it again: We release these betas so that you can test your existing content and start playing around with the new features early. If you encounter anything weird or out of the ordinary then do let us know!

Right… My favorite new features…

For Flash Player 11 it has to be Stage3D (the API previously know as Molehill). 3D on the web is nothing new but when all of a sudden (just about) every web user has 3D capabilities it becomes a whole different ball game. I’m really looking forward to see what you guys build with it. Some of the early demos are absolutely mind-blowing. Another great feature in Flash Player 11 (and an easy one to miss) is native JSON support! (Both features are also available in AIR 3. Stage3D currently only available for desktop. Stage3D for mobile will be enabled in a future release.)

AIR 3 beta 2 is also a really exciting beta release! My favorite feature for AIR 3 is definitely the ability to add the AIR runtime to your installer package. So with AIR 3 you can control exactly which version of the runtime an app executes against and make the installation process a lot easier as well. Hardware accelerated video (aka StageVideo) on mobile is also a big one. And let’s not forget the addition of the encrypted local storage feature on mobile.

Both betas are available on Labs. Flash on!

Another fantastic example demonstrating the power of Molehill. In this video Eugene Zatepyakin produced a special shader to control the light in an AR 3D scene using a real world lightmap from his ASFEAT 3D engine.

Molehill can also be used for 2D projects. Terry Paton recorded his findings in this video:

Flash on!