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Is anyone else excited for Flash Player 10.1?! I know I am. I’ve been following that gosh darn twitter and reading up on the latest features since the public “prerelease” on November 17, 2009, including the Adobe Max Web Conferences. There are a lot of new features on the way which will revolutionize the development of websites across multiple new hardware and mobile platforms alike.

The Support for New Platforms

With the release of 10.1 comes the support of a multitude of mobile devices, including; smartphones, netbooks, and other internet connected devices. Target mobile systems include (but are not limited to): Android 2.0, Microsoft Mobile 6.5, Palm webOS, Symbian S60 V5, as well as Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6. (Notice the lack of “iPhone” on the list…)

The consistent flash player is expected to deliver the most productive experience to users across these new operating systems and devices. This consistency reduces the cost of creating, testing and deploying, essentially the complete essence of development, to such devices.

Designed for Mobility

Mobile text input – Support for native device virtual keyboards with the TextField or inputText is a must if no physical keyboard is detected for mobile devices. The focused text field is centered in the visible region of the screen medium as to not obscure the keyboard or a random event such as an incoming call or a rotation of orientation.

Screen Orientation– Exported SWF content can adjust to different screen parameters depending on orientation landscapes. That is from portrait to landscape, which is consistent with other built-in applications on the device.

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For the past month or so I’ve been reading a lot up on Augmented Reality in the flash environment. According to Wikipedia, Augmented Reality is “is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.”

I observed many examples including useful applications like the United States Postal Service Virtual Box and GE’s Smart Grid. I wanted to develop something similar but on a simpler scale. After a couple of hours of work, and a few energy drinks later, I created a virtual world for my DME1020 class using Augmented Reality. I’d like to share this experience with the JWU AIGA community.

1 ) There are a few files we need before we begin the project. The Flash Augmented Reality Toolkit (FLAR), some attributes from the Flex framework, the Papervision3D library, and a small adobe air application to create our marker, as well as a .dat file that will control the parameters for our webcam. All of these files can be downloaded via this link.

2 ) We need a 3D object to load whenever we see our marker. Since it is so close to Thanksgiving, I’ve decided to use a turkey. Using Google SkethUp’s 3D warehouse I found a .zip of a turkey to use, which includes the necessary files and textures needed. First, click on “Download Model” and “download Collada .zip”. Extract the zip to a folder on your desktop.

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