Adobe is finally enabling 3D games inside its Flash media player and its Adobe Air software with the next release of its technology coming in October. If it works right and becomes popular among game developers, then it could help developers create eye-popping 3D graphics for consumers on smartphone, tablets, and online game platforms. The goal is to get 3D to a billion online players.
Andrew Trice, evangelist at Adobe, said the technology is easy to integrate with social features on Facebook and it can lead to the creation of console-quality games on platforms where it just isn’t possible to make the coolest graphics today. The new Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 will also enable better media and data-driven applications. The hope is that Adobe can live up to its vision as “the game console for the web,” mainly by creating a platform that allows developers to lift the quality of Facebook and mobile games.
The technology from San Jose, Calif.-based is expected to enable cool apps across platforms including Android, Apple iOS (via Air), BlackBerry Tablet OS, Mac OS, Windows, connected TVs, and other platforms. Media companies can use it to deliver protected feature-length cinema-quality high-definition video through the web, in mobile apps, and even with surround sound for connected TVs.
Flash and Air create a single entertainment platform that stretches across devices, Adobe said. The new features in Flash and Air enable a wide variety of special effects. Those include hardware acceleration. In the past, Flash relied on the central processing unit, not the graphics chip built into most machines. So it ran slow and couldn’t run 3D animations fast. Now it will be able to render 2D and 3D graphics 1,000 times faster than Flash Player 10 and Air 2.
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