Introducing Project Aero

A Look Into the Future of Immersive Design & Experiences

Today, we shared a preview of Project Aero, a new augmented reality (AR) authoring tool and multi-platform system that will enable creatives to design immersive content that blurs the lines between the physical and digital worlds. Over the course of our 35+ year history, Adobe has transformed the way people create for print, web and mobile devices, and we see the potential of immersive design to enable new forms of creative expression, customer experiences, and business models that we can’t even imagine today.

At Adobe, our mission has always been to push the limits of creativity, and continuously innovate to support exciting new mediums. Apple is building a leading platform for augmented reality, and we are incredibly happy to announce that we are working with them to help designers and developers create these incredible AR experiences.

Also, in collaboration with Apple and Pixar, we’re also announcing that we will add usdz support to Adobe Creative Cloud apps and services. Designers will be able to create AR content from popular creative tools such as Photoshop CC and Dimension CC and convert assets into usdz that can be natively consumed in the Apple ecosystem.

AR content development today also requires a combination of creativity and technical skills. Project Aero will deliver a system for both developers and creatives to build simple AR scenes and experiences leveraging Apple’s ARKit. Designers can easily create immersive content that can then be brought into Xcode for further refinement and development.

Here is a look at what the future of AR brings:

To deliver on the promise of AR requires a fundamental rethinking of what it means to create with new tools, technologies and interaction models. Every business group across Adobe is thinking about and building for this new immersive design medium.

As a preview of what’s to come, we’ve partnered with 15 artists for The Festival of the Impossible, the first large-scale immersive art exhibition celebrating artwork that explores the impossible during a 3-day festival in San Francisco June 8-10.

This is just the beginning of our journey to extend digital experiences beyond the screen and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead. We’ll have much more to share at the Adobe MAX Creativity Conference later this fall.