Atmosphere is serious business
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A White Paper
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4. Atmosphere: Real Estate for a New Reality
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So what can you imagine what you could do with Atmosphere content in your site pages? Atmosphere is designed to be much more than just another 3D technology. Atmosphere is a general purpose inhabited 3D space for the web, and goes far beyond the game environments that have dominated online 3D. When you start to think in terms of "space", "place", "human interfaces" and "real time presence" the whole web starts to look different. What is that difference? The web starts to look less like a bulletin board and more like "real real estate". Want some examples? Here goes..
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The Atmosphere Gallery with works by artists Linda Bergkvist, Valery Milovic, Nancy Zuidema and Bruce Damer
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Personal Creative Spaces: Atmosphere at the service of the artist
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If you are an artist (digital or traditional), or photographer you have probably thought of creating some kind of an online gallery to promote your works for sale. Until now that gallery space would be restricted to a simple website where you could post thumbnail images of your work. This can be effective but how much better your chances of making that sale would be if you could meet each serious buyer "live" and walk with them through a full 3D gallery? If after looking at your "web catalogue" 2D images, your site guest could click on a button to enter the gallery, which would signal you if you were online, or schedule you for a live tour if you were not available.
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The Big Event: Cybertradeshows for commerce and community
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A couple of users in their avatars standing at the virtual booth for Adobe inside a Cybertradeshow. One waves to tell me to take the shot.
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Tradeshows and conferences are big business and gosh, you just don't have the time or budget to go to every one, and that streaming webcast just doesn't capture the feeling or information you get in the exhibit hall. Adobe Atmosphere is a platform built to deliver the cybertradeshow experience. Our company, DigitalSpace, has been doing these events for thousands of online attendees since 1998 and so we decided to design a glorious 3D tradeshow floor, complete with booths representing an educational institution (Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California), DM3D Studios (a 3D design studio in Australia who created these Atmosphere spaces), a nonprofit association (the Contact Constortium of Scotts Valley, California), a governement agency (NASA for the FMARS project), and Adobe itself.
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Human presence at the event: four of us, with me behind the camera, touring the exhibit hall.
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Retail Gets Real
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Atmosphere Motors, a virtual car showroom with high quality Viewpoint automobile models
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How many early e-commerce websites did you visit and fill up your shopping cart only to have to give up because you just needed to talk to someone? These sites were mostly nothing more than online catalogues and there was always that nagging problem of a lack of human contact. We all know that successful retail is a combination of two things: great presentation and great customer service. Atmosphere supports both so you no longer have to power commerce using a simple webpage showing static images but instead you can now present an immersive experience of an actual shop or showroom. Add to that the fact that when you enter a showroom like "Atmosphere Motors" above you can be met by a real, live, breathing human being who can help you with your purchase. Why settle for less?
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The Virtual Office Gets a New Life
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A virtual office in Atmosphere
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There is a lot of talk about "virtual offices" but these environments are usually nothing more than file transfer programs, email or ordinary web pages. While this is a very important part of office life, these are not in fact the office. Offices serve as social spaces, organizational places, and as an aid to memory (yes, those important files are always stacked by my left foot). If you could organize your electronic documents, your notes, calendar, your images into a 3D space, well, you might be able to organize your thoughts better. Add to this the fact that you can have actual live meetings in this next generation virtual office, and it looks as though Atmosphere has the power to transform the SOHO experience. And why stop at one virtual office, when you could have a dozen, all organized for different purposes and people. Want to take your "office building" on the road? No problem, because Adobe Atmosphere runs embedded in the web, over modem connections, and on all popular consumer platforms without requiring hardware acceleration, your laptop computer can be a great home for your mobile enterprise. Who knows, one day, the company headquarters may move completely into Atmosphere!
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For Online learning, Atmosphere brings whole worlds to your classroom
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Entrance to the ramp down to the base crypt of the great pyramid at Giza
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Imagine if you are your college's resident Egyptologist and you wanted to offer a course in the time of the Pharaohs to a global audience? Atmosphere has the texturing, lighting and sound capability to create realistic scenes that envelop your students in a space only made more convincing than being there. Linking in video, audio and web pages onto any surface in an Atmosphere space gives you the ability to package solid courseware around the "virtual field trip" of your dreams.
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Another historic site:Stonehenge
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