Announcing pbjAS – An ActionScript 3.0 Pixel Bender Shader Library
One of the major new features in Flash Player 10 is Pixel Bender. Like its name suggests, the primary purpose of Pixel Bender is to allow you to easily manipulate pixels inside a Flash application. A great demo of this is the FotoBooth application, which applies different filters to webcam input. While tweaking pixels is the primary purpose of Pixel Bender, it can also be used as a multi-threaded number crunching machine. You can pass it some numbers, have it perform some mathematical operations on those numbers, and then return the result. This opens up some very interesting opportunities to get outside of the normal single-threaded nature of ActionScript in Flash Player.