Exploring Augmented Reality Technology
Sometimes the most challenging thing we can do in our careers is to break out of what we know to explore something new, out of our comfort zone, and/or downright terrifying. For me, that was exploring how I could bring my work as an artist to Augmented Reality, AR.
The possibilities of AR technology are boundless and have already touched our lives as modern consumers of technology. An easy example is how Instagram and snapchat filters that augment our faces have become a normal part of our day to day lives. We are regular consumers of AR technology but for a long time, being able to become AR artists of our own has not been as accessible. However, with more mainstream applications such as Adobe Aero, the ability to participate in the development of our AR creations is slowly becoming more and more accessible.
Adobe Aero is primarily accessible to subscribers of the Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe’s primary subscription service with access to their most popular applications: Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. However, Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers also have access to their new and emerging applications such as Fresco, Aero, and Capture. Each of these applications have the ability to share files between them, and this is one of the best parts of Adobe Cloud technology: the ability to access files through each program. For example, if you create your artwork in Illustrator, you can aso import it into Aero, and vice versa. I decided to start designing my own AR experiences with Adobe Aero because I had lots of existing artwork in Photoshop and Illustrator that I could import into Aero.
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Emerging Technologies
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I believe that the best way to learn any new application is to start by just playing around with it and keeping an open mind. Opening the application in my ipad, the software gained access to my ipad camera and immediately began to identify and calibrate to the surfaces in my room. I actually ended up moving to my living room because I needed more empty surfaces that the software could identify. I discovered that Aero is a software that gives creators the ability to turn their files into augmented reality experiences. It does not offer the ability to paint and create artwork in the program.
What Aero did provide me was the ability to create a walk through experience with artwork that I was able to import from layers from Photoshop as well as Ipad’s creative application, Procreate, into Aero. While I couldn’t create in the program, I was able to decide how viewers would be able to see the breakdown of all the layers of my artwork on the walls of their own home. I was able to overlay audio and interactive elements into each 3D object, and when users get within a certain radius of the artwork, the audio would automatically play.
As I was testing out the technology, I thought about how AR experiences could be applied to the artwork that I create for Linkedin Learning. In Michael Fugoso’s Adobe Max tutorial, Augmented Reality Making Your Work Pop with Illustrator and Aero, Fugoso demonstrated how vectorized illustrations can be given a layered paper effect that could pop out of surfaces through Aero. From a marketing standpoint, the ability to make these thumbnails more interactive, interesting, and immersive is a powerful tool to implement for consumer retention.
This is where I will take my journey next, creating more interactive elements with artwork that I am creating and pushing the bounds of how it can reach others.
“I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day. It will become that much a part of you.”
