Adobe Goes 3D.(readies Adobe Atmosphere)(Product Announcement)

Adobe Systems has entered the realm of real-time Web 3D with Adobe Atmosphere, the publishing company's first Web authoring and viewing tool for interactive 3D worlds. "The fact that Adobe has come out with Atmosphere shows great promise for 3D Web graphics," says Wanda Meloni, analyst with M2 Research in California. "The market has finally moved beyond the elite animation professionals to those 2 million-plus professional content creators who have been working strictly in a 2D environment."

Atmosphere consists of three modules. The first, Builder, is aimed at 3D content creators and Web developers. It provides a palette of 3D objects--primitives as well as architectural elements such as doors and stairways--with which users can lay out and structure a room or other 3D environment. Objects can be snapped together using connectors, so that when an object is moved or resized, all objects connected to it are correspondingly adjusted or resized. Since Atmosphere is based on Viewpoint's Media Player, models and animations created in third-party 3D applications such as Discreet's 3ds max or Alias|Wavefront's Maya can be directly imported into an Atmosphere world after being converted to Viewpoint format. Developers may also use JavaScript for including animations and sound in ...