Adobe's new game changer: Democratising the Augmented Reality sector

The software maker is working on new tools and a platform to enable users to create AR experiences with seamless ease

Adobe, the US software major that single-handedly shaped the design industry across the globe, is conceiving yet another game changer.

At Adobe MAX, the company's annual flagship event in Los Angeles, Adobe gave a demo of its newest augmented reality (AR) developer tool -- Project Aero.

Augmented Reality or AR is a technique by which real-life objects are ‘augmented’ by computer-generated graphics to provide a composite view. Even though the technology has been there for some time, it is yet to make inroads into mainstream applications due to the lack of simplified software and tools.

Project Aero will enable creative professionals and developers to design AR experiences and new forms of immersive content. What makes it special is that for the first time, users will be able to design end-to-end AR experiences with little or no technical or coding skills.

Add to this, Adobe’s plans to integrate its other design tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator with Aero (by making them capable of turning 2D models into 3D), the new tool has the potential to push AR into the mainstream.

“Adobe as a company has always embraced new storytelling mediums. Whether it’s print, PC, web or mobile, we’ve always looked around the corner and built creative platforms for the future. We believe that we’re now at a similar inflection point with Augmented Reality as the next breakthrough medium,” said Shanmugh Natarajan, managing director at Adobe India.

“Our goal with Aero is to establish a new discipline for immersive design and enable the creation of high-quality AR experiences.”

AR and its cousin VR, or virtual reality, are technologies that have left the world obsessing over them since the late 2000s.

VR came first alongside advances in digital photography. A bunch of people thought of putting a 360-degree end-to-end stitched image on a computer screen. Then another group, possibly computer geeks, created a screen-embedded headset and put things like gyroscopes on it. The result: VR headsets that give users an immersive experience in which they can move around in a virtual environment.

AR, on the other hand, works on a mobile or tablet screen using a camera on the device. Simply put, it’s a technology that puts a ‘virtual’ and ‘moving’ object on the camera’s video feed, real-time. Yet, it isn't as simple as it seems. AR requires extremely sophisticated programs capable of mapping the entire surrounding and placing ‘virtual’ items on real objects in a manner as indistinguishable as possible. The hard part is, the virtual items must stay where they are when the user pans in or out, or moves the camera around.

VR, the early marvel, impressed people when it came out with state-of-the-art devices such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, though AR has become the talk of the town lately.

A case in point is Pokemon Go, a mobile game that broke practically every mobile game record. It’s a simple gameplay - users move around with their phone cameras pointing at the surrounding areas, spot a Pokemon (a creature from 1997 eponymous cartoon) and ‘catch them all’.

Pokemon Go is based on AR as the Pokemons, placed algorithmically at certain locations on the map, pop up in the camera view. In less than six months of its launch, the game was downloaded over 500 million times.

It isn't just in gaming that AR has made a mark. The technology opens to the door to hundreds of use-cases in areas like  advertising, marketing, education, industrial training and so on.

UK-based Blippar, an AR firm with engineering operations in Bengaluru, allows brands to promote their products in a special way. A user, shopping at a supermarket, can point the phone’s camera towards, say, a new variety of cheese, and will see its nutrients and other constituents right on the phone screen.

In the education sector, tech firms are developing solutions in which workers and engineers can point their phones towards a chip circuit and see the labels of its various components and learn about their functions. Education and training are said to emerge as the largest segments to drive the adoption of AR.

The development of AR experiences is currently a scarce and sought-after skill. “As of now, the process involves a 3D design component and hardcore coding knowledge,” said Manu Trivedi, founder and CEO of VR product start-up Tantransha. “With Aero, Adobe’s aim is to let users create a lot more experiences without having too much technical know-how,” he added.

One of the reasons the adoption of AR has been slow thus far is that software from Google and Apple, currently the most-used in the market, are not interoperable. They often restrict the developers to their own ecosystem for functions and hardware.

With Project Aero, an attempt is being made to bring standardised formats and protocols. “Full realisation of the potential of AR requires a broad ecosystem. To that end, we are partnering with technology leaders to standardise interaction models and file formats, and to provide the creative community with tools for creating in this rapidly advancing space,” said Adobe’s Natarajan. “We’re working with open standards efforts such as usdz and glTF, and leading platform vendors, together with Pixar, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft and the creative community, to deliver a comprehensive AR offering.”

The company said Aero is currently in beta stage and is available to users on invite-only basis. Mass roll-out will happen in 2019.