June 2020 release of Adobe Aero: New features to create even more immersive AR experiences

Augmented reality is the next great frontier of digital storytelling. While the medium and the technology that powers it have been advancing rapidly over the past few years, authoring has been a challenge for creators. When we released Adobe Aero at Adobe MAX last year, we put a cutting-edge authoring tool in the hands of anyone who wants to make and share an AR experience. Now, with the latest release of Aero, we’re pushing the tool even further, adding new features to help you blur the lines between the physical and digital worlds.

We’ve seen artists and designers create some incredible work already – just look at the latest innovations from Don Allen III in his clear mirror series, and Naima Almeida, whose playful scenes created in her home with Aero are putting a smile on many people’s faces during a challenging time. We’ve shared much of this great work on our new Adobe Aero Instagram channel, and now we’re launching the next part of the AR journey: audio.

Add spatial audio to your AR experiences to create truly immersive environments

You will now be able to bring audio files into Aero to create rich multi-sensory experiences. This will allow you to take your AR experiences to the next level, and along with new UI enhancements that help you create more complex experiences, this latest release of Aero helps you express yourself and tell whatever story you’d like in AR.

To create impactful immersive experiences, it’s often important to connect to several of the senses. In this release of Adobe Aero, we’re adding the ability to import audio into your AR creations so you can design interactive audio experiences, along with your visuals. Add sound effects to objects in AR, create triggers that start playing short-form music, and add dialogues or conversations to your scene – the possibilities are endless.

The spatial audio engine built into Aero will allow you to effectively design multi-sensory experiences, where sounds are triggered based on actions taken by the user. This makes it easy to design an accurate soundscape for any AR experience, tied to the layout of the digital objects in a room.. The level and frequency of these sounds can be also altered based on a viewer’s actions and directional changes, for maximum realism.

Audio in Aero works via a simple import feature that allows you to bring .WAV and .MP3 files into the app. If you don’t have audio files of your own or just need something to get started, you can access over 120 sound effects right from the Play audio action panel in the Behavior builder tool. From there, it’s easy to add these files to objects and define their behavior, allowing you to easily play and experiment with creating the best immersive AR experience.

Designer Naima Almeida used Adobe Aero to design an imaginary interactive garden with integrated spatial sound effects. This was made in collaboration with Vladimir Petkovic.

New authoring enhancements and better video capture to help you create best-in-class AR experiences

When it comes to creating an engrossing, immersive experience in Adobe Aero, we know precision is key. That’s why we’ve made several enhancements to the UI to give designers more control when creating a scene. Now, you’ll be able to access the 3D Gizmo – this new tool gives you a greater level of control and visual feedback when placing objects, going beyond the capabilities of the existing slider and free-form moving, scaling, or rotating options.

You can now open a scene graph to see all the contents of an experience, making it easy to select specific objects for editing. With toggles for visibility and the ability to rename, delete or lock each object, you can stay organized and add complexity to any experience with a greater level of control.

In response to feedback from the Aero community, we’ve also made considerable improvements to the quality of video capture in Aero so now recordings of your experiences will look better than ever.

The next great leap forward in democratizing AR

With these latest enhancements to Adobe Aero, we’re taking another step forward in democratizing the creation of multi-sensory augmented reality. We can’t wait to see what you’re able to create as you harness both visuals and audio to design immersive AR experiences.

Follow our community’s artwork on our new Adobe Aero Instagram channel, and download Aero for mobile.

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