Project Dali
Adobe
New technologies emerge often arrive with new assumptions, but the benefits are frequently disguised until they are in service of a need (necessity being the mother of invention).
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
The immersive experiences of AR & VR have been quick to delight. It’s easy to see the potential, but harder to know the value.
The pursuit of knowledge and understanding yields velocity in preparation of opportunity.
Adobe WWSC (World Wide Sale Conference) Demo
Early Days
Project Dali started in earnest in 2016 after I joined Adobe’s Research Organization. It provided a space to better understand the emerging technologies of Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR/VR) while providing an environment to socialize my discoveries, collaborate with colleagues and eventually gather user research.
Once receiving the Vive development hardware, I brought some of the 2D drawing code I was working with into 3D.
Technology at the bleeding edge is exciting as well chaotic. With seemingly infinite possibilities and the absence of standards, the need to learn first hand how each new platform was aiming to solve these platform and experience needs was a constant source of education.
Learn
Balancing the thought that VR could change everything about the existing set of creative tools, I was also keen to explore the idea of incremental improvements to the existing applications. Asking the question of “If I could only change one thing, what would it be?”
Frequently exploring this idea across the suite of applications, this prototype look to improve the speed of layer selection and manipulation (with the added benefit of camera re-position).
Adobe Opportunity
ARKit with LiDAR. Point Cloud Pointillism.
Controlling 3D objects on a 2D screen presents a number of challenges for the user. While traditional object manipulators are able accommodate this task, the path to the desired outcome requires some forethought strategies. This method aims to make a different contextual relationship when the user places 2 fingers on the same object by creating a ‘roll bar’ that is anchored between the two points of contact.
2 Finger 3D Manipulation on a 2D surface
Inspired by rolling a pencil through your fingers, the idea is that you are creating a dynamic pivot point and rotational axis based on where you touch the object. Through repeat use the user would then design there own strategies for moving objects around the environment to create more organic results.
Experiences created for VR are difficult share, but we still wanted to find a way to share our excitement for the project and give people a sense of the immersive feelings we were having.
To accomplish this we added tracking to an external camera so we could then overlay objects from the virtual environment with the video that was being recorded externally.
We were even able to do all of this in real time.
A Peek into VR
ARKit with LiDAR. Point Cloud Pointillism.