Atmospherians > Showcase > Commercial

Atmosphere is serious business

A White Paper

2. Why Adobe and Atmosphere?

I don't work for Adobe (never have) but I have been a fan of Adobe's products for almost fifteen years. In its early days, Adobe was a company all about producing the infrastructure for desktop publishing in the form of a standard way to represent documents before they were printed: PostScript.

I remember getting my first taste of PostScript back in 1987 and the delight I experienced hand-coding lines of PostScript and seeing the magic that was produced on my hulking 500 pound Varityper image setter (how about text in a spiral?).

Then as now, Adobe took the long term approach: build an excellent infrastructure (scalable type, resolution independent document formats, support for color and more) and persisted until the world adopted PostScript. At that time, there was a jumble of incompatible, proprietary systems for printing, but that did not deter Adobe. Only later on, after that infrastructure was in place did Adobe enter the tools market, with now famous applications such as Photoshop and Premier. Adobe helped birth a community and an industry (desktop publishing and then multimedia) that by the early 90s set the stage for the next step: the World Wide Web.

So you can guess how intrigued I was when I was invited by the team at Adobe to be a participant in the Atmosphere private beta and launch. I thought to myself for the first time ever, a company that really understands content and the people who make it, is supporting the medium I love, the shared worlds of avatar cyberspace. And like PostScript before it, Adobe has both the resources and long term thinking to create a new standard infrastructure for inhabited, dimensional Cyberspace.

True to their nature, Adobe is interested in building a content community, not competing with it, so they start by giving away the browsers, plugins and servers, and an intuitive authoring tool. After the creative content community matures and the user base is growing, Adobe will provide a suite of advanced authoring and management tools.Adobe is out to provide us all the great gift of a standard in 3D in our online futures, build a medium and empower users and content creators. Excited?
Lets take a look under the covers of this new machine called Atmosphere. Next