There’s a lot of discussion going on at the moment about the future of Flash, particularly how it will sit alongside HTML5 moving forwards. Even as I start to explore the potential of the latter tech, a part of me still appreciates Flash as a platform that has matured very well in the past couple of years – giving hybrids a powerful way of realising ideas which up until this point, no other solution came close to offering. More interestingly for me, Flash has been augmented with a wide range of other technologies and ported libraries which again, keeps it a very interesting technology to develop with.
This simple Air app calculates the luminosity of each pixel of a YouTube video during run time, and projects the result into 3D using the height map as data for the z-axis. Credit to the early work created by agit8, which gave me the idea to test with YouTube videos.
The app works with any unrestricted YouTube video – just copy and paste the URL into the bar. There are also some options [+] which allow you play around with some of the variables and show the original video as a thumbnail for comparison. Default video is “Chrome Speed Test”.