Adobe Systems has started work to bring 3D to its Flash platform, and will preview the technology at the company’s upcoming developer conference in October.

A session titled “Flash Player 3D Future” will outline a future version of Flash that will be capable of playing 3D content, according to a program listing for the Adobe Max 2010 trade show, which will be held in Los Angeles Oct. 23-27.

The session will take “a deep dive into the next-generation 3D API coming in a future version of Flash Player,” according to the listing. The Flash Player is available as a browser plug-in that allows users to play games or view multimedia content. Google’s YouTube uses Flash for video distribution on its Web site.

The session is “going to be big,” said Thibault Imbert, a Flash product manager at Adobe in a blog entry.

“If you are into 3D development for games, augmented reality or just interactive stuff like Web sites, you just can’t miss the session,” Imbert wrote.

Adobe officials were unavailable for comment Friday on a release date for a 3D Flash Player. The company had closed for the day, according to a spokeswoman for A&R Edelman, Adobe’s public relations agency.

Adobe already offers tools for 3D animation in Flash, but the new platform could bring richer 3D experiences. This could be an important development as games and videos are increasingly produced in 3D.

At the Computex trade show last month, graphics chip company Nvidia demonstrated 3D video streaming live over the Internet using a video player based on Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.

Adobe has also engaged in a public spat with Apple, which does not support playback of Flash content on its iPhone and iPad devices. Apple prefers distributing video and multimedia content through the HTML5 standard, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs has publicly derided Flash for being buggy, slow and power hungry.

News Provider:  PC World

YouTube weighed in Wednesday on the question of whether HTML5 is ready to replace Flash Player as the preferred video-distribution vehicle for the web — an idea first proposed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in April. According to a new YouTube blog post, Adobe Flash currently provides the best platform for meeting the video-distribution requirements of the online service.

Though the video support built into HTML5 enables YouTube to deliver most of the service’s content and features to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, YouTube software engineer John Harding observed that HTML5 has substantial shortcomings.

“We’ve been excited about the HTML5 effort and video tag for quite a while now, and most YouTube videos can now be played via our HTML5 player,” Harding wrote in a blog. “This work has shown us that, while the video tag is a big step forward for open standards, the Adobe Flash platform will continue to play a critical role in video distribution.”

Flash Player Advantages

According to Harding, one of the drawbacks of HTML5 is that the next major revision of the HTML standard currently under development does not address video-streaming protocols. By contrast, Flash Player provides fine control over buffering as well as dynamic quality control, Harding wrote.

“Flash Player addresses these needs by letting applications manage the downloading and playback of video via ActionScript in conjunction with either HTTP or the RTMP video-streaming protocol,” Harding wrote.

Furthermore, Harding observed that Flash Player’s ability to combine application code and resources into a secure, efficient package has been instrumental in enabling YouTube videos to be embedded in other web sites. “While HTML5 adds sandboxing and message-passing functionality, Flash is the only mechanism most web sites allow for embedded content from other sites,” he wrote.

Other Flash Player advantages over HTML5 include the ability to enable the viewing of high-definition videos in full-screen mode, which Harding noted has not historically been possible with pure HTML.

“While most browsers have a full-screen mode, they do not allow JavaScript to initiate it, nor do they allow a small part of the page — such as a video player — to fill the screen,” Harding explained. “Flash Player provides robust, secure controls for enabling hardware-accelerated full-screen displays.”

Customer Experience Advice

Customer experience professionals also need to be aware of HTML5′s shortcomings when it comes to designing rich, highly functional user experiences, noted Ronald Rogowski, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

The downside to using HTML5 right now “is that it could lead to inconsistent experiences across today’s browsers,” Rogowski cautioned in a blog. HTML5 also “compromises performance for graphics-heavy experiences, [and] will require that users download a browser that supports the technology,” he wrote.

One big advantage of Adobe Flash is that the technology is already ubiquitous. “Over 99 percent of all Internet users have downloaded it into their browsers, often to view video content,” noted Al Hilwa, director of application development software at IDC.

Rogowski sees a few places where HTML5 can help improve user experiences today, such as providing an improved experience for people with disabilities. At the moment, however, Rogowski doesn’t think HTML5 is a viable platform for delivering next-generation rich Internet content and functionality.

“Forrester recommends using HTML5 as a way to enhance text-based content experiences while looking to more established technologies like Flash and Silverlight to build high-functional applications,” Rogowski wrote.

News Provider : Mark Long From News Factor Network