Conway's Game Of Life using Pixelbender

Couldn't resist trying to create a pixelbender filter for use in the Game of Life. In an article a few years ago I created a simple Life application. Pixelbender has the potential to massively increase the speed of calculations such as those used in Life, the results are obvious. On top of this the simplicity within flash is fantastic, to advance the game you simply need to apply a filter to a bitmapData object. Click to launch the app:

Crossfade Using Pixelbender

I am currently doing some work for a client which involves background subtraction. I have been getting into using pixel bender to calculate filters in flash for a while now, but doing some research I found there is actually huge scope for using pixel bender to carry out other calculations (see this article).

The following example uses pixel bender as a part of the background subtraction process. Consecutive frames from the webcam are blended with all previous frames. The eventual result is to produce a good estimate of the background pixels. The example uses the blendShader property of a display object with blend mode set to BlendMode.SHADER, and a custom Pixelbender shader that mixes pixels. Check it out (click to launch):

Pixel Bender Filters

Just had a little play around with Pixel Bender and it is absolutely fantastic. In this experiment I just recreated 3 bog standard filters, contrast, brightness and saturation, and then made a little posterizer and a sepia filter as well. Creating these kinds of filters is so much easier Pixel Bender than it is using matrices in flash. All of the parameters can be adjusted and multiple filters can be applied at the same time. The posterizer has some flaws which I need to sort out but that movie is the result of literally half an hour playing around and getting them all to work. Next step, saving video snapshots to a server! Enjoy