May 13, 2011 14:10 GMT  ·  By

With the release of the latest Adobe Flash Player 10.3, the experimental Flash Player Incubator has also been updated. It comes with plenty of updates to the testing features it incorporates. The Molehill project, which brought advanced 3D graphics capabilities to Flash, is getting closer to being released and has now gotten an official name, Stage 3D.

Adobe is clearly interested in the communication applications that developers can build on Flash technology.

While a number of voice quality technologies have been included in Flash Player 10.3, the Incubator build touts the inclusion of the G.711 audio codec for telephony and support for H.264/AVC SW Encode for camera encoding.

There are several updates for those coding for Flash, developers can use JSON for their data ensuring compatibility with other web apps. A few new event notifications have been added, Socket Progress Events and Pause/sleep/resume Events.

The biggest update though is to the Molehill 3D graphics project, which enables developers to access the GPU for significantly improved graphics performance and quality, regardless if its for 2D or 3D content.

"We now have an official name for one of our first Incubator technologies — the project formerly known by the code name 'Molehill' will be called Stage 3D. Stage 3D is a new method/model of 2D and 3D rendering developed by Adobe and is supported with a new Stage3D API," Adobe announced.

"The Stage3D API is a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices (desktop, mobile and TV). These new low-level APIs will provide 2D and 3D engine developers the flexibility to leverage GPU hardware acceleration for significant performance gains," it explained.

Flash Player Incubator is an experimental build that enables Adobe to test its new technologies in the wild and developers to start building their apps before the new features are included in the regular builds.