Adobe Atmosphere: Adobe's new tool enables rich, interactive experiences.(Adobe Systems Inc. new product)

Interactivity. Real-time imaging.

Immersive environments. These buzzwords have floated around the industry for years. Software developers continue to produce products that change these words into reality, even virtual reality. Adobe is no exception. The company launched Atmosphere, a software tool for creating interactive, immersive, 3D multimedia environments to be delivered via the Web or PDF.

Through 3D objects, directional sound, streaming audio and video, SWF animations, and physical behaviors, Atmosphere creates what Adobe calls "Stages," using a live-theater metaphor. Visitors to (or, more appropriately, viewers of) Stages can freely navigate and interact with the environments.

Atmosphere is an easy-to-use authoring tool for the creation and publishing of real-time environments. It is essentially a game engine in a box. I am impressed by the ability to create great-looking environments. This solution holds potential for visual effects specialists, film producers, multimedia designers, and architects. Yet, I am most excited about its application by authors.

Imagine reading Alice in Wonderland online or in a PDF document and coming to a beautiful image of the Mad Hatter's tea party. Clicking in the picture, you enter the illustration and move around as the action unfolds. Click on the teapot and find the dormouse sleeping inside. When finished with the scene, you return to the story where you left off and read on until the next immersive illustration. This is the beginning of interactive storytelling.

Atmosphere's interface is not the most intuitive, and will take some getting used to. The opening screen defaults to a rather cramped work environment; yet, thankfully, every floating palette can be resized and moved to provide more elbowroom. The one World View defaults to Top View, but I changed it with a few simple hot keys. Other palettes include Object Hierarchy, Scene Hierarchy, Light, and Inspector.

A Player window boasts a real-time preview of how a scene will look when published. Each change made in the work environment is updated instantly in the Player view, where I could easily navigate the scene using the mouse or arrow keys.