Atmosphere is serious business |
A White Paper |
3. Atmosphere: the Inside Story |
| Creators of rich media content have all been to the same place: you want to deploy something innovative, and you can't because your end users won't have the ability to view it. We all know how hard it is to convince people to download and install separate software or worse, hardware. For years, providing large rich 3D spaces meant two things: it will need hardware accelerations and it only runs on a Windows PC. Well, Adobe's Atmosphere team saw all this and said: make it cross platform (Mac and Windows), make it install seamlessly as a plug-in or control for Netscape or Internet Explorer and make it run in software. What a Herculean task, you might think, but the Atmosphere team has achieved this. In its final release, some months following this first public beta today, Atmosphere will deliver the full package. |
| Atmosphere was designed from the ground up to democratize the experience of shared 3D spaces on the Internet. Every step of the way, the creators of Atmosphere worked to the mantra "author easily, deliver to anyone, run everywhere". Here are some examples of what they have built into Atmosphere to achieve this:3D spaces and avatars can exist at any web address, so can their textures, using common JPEG and PNG formats, as well as sounds and javascript to drive animations. Atmosphere content can therefore be fully distributed, with the multi-user server running on one system and content coming from a variety of places around the internet. No centralized model is enforced so you could scale to hundreds of thousands or millions of users in thousands of worlds.An Atmosphere world is actually rendered to the screen with two different technologies: one engine paints the room spaces, walls, landscapes, and "props" and another creates high fidelity effects. That second engine is the Viewpoint technology supporting the Metastream format, arguably one of the highest fidelity systems for delivering 3D content on the net. Where the human attention is focused is usually in two places: on detailed pictures and on detailed objects. Atmosphere allows unlimited texture sizes so feel free to create that art gallery of your dreams. With the Metastream objects, detail and lighting of human characters, products, or any gizmo you like, will exceed anything you have experienced online. How about an auto show room where that cars really look like cars, no problem in Atmosphere! Industry leading modeling tool Poser is fully supported by Atmosphere so your avatars and human figures can attain new heights of detail and animation. Exporters from 3D Studio MAX and other tools give the high end author the power to produce for Atmosphere. Movie caliber 3D special effects have arrived on the net with Atmosphere |
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Creating a spiral staircase in two easy steps in Atmosphere |
| Atmosphere worlds are created out of "primitives", which means that a staircase is simply an object, with a set of transformations applied to it. For example, want a fancy spiral staircase? Easy.. in Atmosphere simply pull up a staircase, anchor it to the floor, and apply a twist. This approach is a triple whammie of benefits: 1. Worlds are easy to author, instead of drawing out endless meshes and polygons, you quickly snap together objects, stretch and shrink, extrude and carve out and voila: a Gothic cathedral! 2. Content is easy to deliver: 3D spaces represented as primitives are much smaller than those described in polygons, so a big, detailed space downloads in a file the size of a typical web graphic 3. Spaces are easy to decorate: want to wrap any web graphic around an object, easy! You can even project ordinary JPEGs out and paint a whole room at one shot. 4. Content scales: on a slower computer? Atmosphere can render in lower resolution, turn off advanced effects like fog, and guarantee a level of experience for a large audience. And of course, Atmosphere is multi-user. Nobody wants to be the only diner in a restaurant, or the sole soul in a cavernous museum, so why should we experience 3D on the net alone? Atmosphere supports multi-user out of the box with a high performance community server capable of hosting thousands of simultaneous users. You can host your own community server and create a series of private worlds for your own customer base.Gosh where does it end? Atmosphere supports surround sound effects using spatialized audio in a number of popular file formats. Next |