— Menu —

Adobe Atmosphere scenes need to be interactive - and that means programming.

No matter how beautiful your Adobe Atmosphere scenes are, your visitors will soon be bored - if you don't give them something to do. If you want to use any communications medium well, you must be true to its unique nature. Adobe Atmosphere is not limited to beautiful immersive 3D scenes. To use it fully, you must also exploit its powerful interactivity.

Therefore, i'm starting to add tutorials about scripted animation effects. These will range from using the "Script Presets", which come with Adobe Atmosphere, to examples of 100% custom code. Don't look here for tutorials on JavaScript programming though. I'm barely past amateur status in JavaScript myself.

Giving your visitors something to do doesn't mean you have to create games or rides, although those can be good choices. Nor does interactivity have to mean that your scene interacts directly with the visitor's avatar. Animated effects or objects that are part of your Adobe Atmosphere scene can engage the visitor in interactive exploration, besides adding a lot to a scene's realism.

A simple but powerful form of scene interactivity is chat. Adobe was very smart to include good chat features in Adobe Atmosphere. People love to socialize and an Atmosphere scene can provide interesting subject matter to socialize about.

This makes Adobe Atmosphere chats much more interesting than the usual inane conversations of most chat rooms, which have given chat a bad name. And the potential for specialized meeting rooms, teaching/training or selling environments is enormous.

Interactivity, the Call to Code
Okay, "interactivity" in Adobe Atmosphere means using or even writing JavaScript programs. Okay again, many of you find programming at least a bit daunting.

Speaking of unique natures, quite a few Adobe Atmosphere builders, who have design experience but none in programming, have convinced themselves that they are congenitally incapable of programming. For a very few this may be true, but i believe most of us can develop skills in both the visual and the coding arts.

It's true that people tend to fall naturally into the "Designer" or "Programmer" tribes. But i can tell you from personal experience that you really can do both, if you want to. Perhaps you can't be equally good at both skill sets, but good enough is usually sufficient.

While i'm trying to dispel myths, there is that silly notion amoung designers that visual work is creative and coding work is not. That's like saying that writing prose is creative, but writing Haiku poems is not. Creative writing under very strict limitations, be they poetic rules or a readership made entirely of machines, is still creative writing. I think writing for machines may require even more creativity than writing for other humans.

A very good reason to learn to code is that most programmers find it to be fun in the extreme. If you enjoy design, writing, problem solving, working through puzzles, etc. you'll find writing code to be a big blast. Why leave all the fun to others?

Do I Have to Code?
I certainly encourage you to learn JavaScript and how to apply it to Adobe Atmosphere, if you don't already know. This is how you tap the full creative power of Adobe Atmosphere. But there are alternatives, if you are willing to accept their inherent problems.

Alternative 1:
You can just use the "Script Presets" that come with Adobe Atmosphere. The user community is slowly adding to this resource. To date though, this library of pre-built scripts is still small. And you can't expect script presets to do exactly what you had in mind very often. After all, they are generic solutions and one size seldom fits all.

Alternative 2:
Or you can join an Adobe Atmosphere development team that has a programming specialist. For commercial projects, this is the usual way to go. For Adobe Atmosphere solo developers or fine artists, this may not be a practical option.

As Adobe Atmosphere becomes more popular, i expect to see freelance programmers offering contract services to you solo builders - for a price.

Or consider a minimum development team of just two individuals. One will concentrate on programming and the other will specialize in visual content. Perhaps both will work on design and business issues.

Such a minimalist team can give you an alternative to being a solo builder, without your having to join a traditional business enterprise and without a lot of bureaucratic overhead. The ability to collaborate online and share a virtual office means partners need not be in the same time zone and can work from home. Such minimal teams have produced some of the best Adobe Atmosphere content to date.

Alternative 3:
Learn just enough JavaScript to customize the code written by others, either the Adobe Script Presets or code from the script gurus.

Of course, i'm fooling you here. Once you start to learn, you'll probably never want to stop part way. But this is a good way to get started, and even experienced script writers are likely to incorporate a lot of code developed by others. The friendly Adobe Atmosphere developer community shares a lot of code online and often collaborates (for free) to solve each others coding problems, through Adobe's forum, AtmosphereCentral and elsewhere.