Learn augmented reality workflows & best practices for creating AR experiences in both 2D & 3D.
Augmented Reality Workflow
The typical AR workflow, including storyboarding, prototyping, AR scene creation in Adobe Aero, & user testing.
What you learned: A Typical Augmented Reality Workflow.
- Goal Setting: Whenever you start a project, it's important to establish your goals and the audience’s goals. This will bring clarity to your decision-making throughout the development process.
- Sketching & Ideating: By brainstorming and sketching, you can quickly come up with a number of ideas and begin to articulate your plan.
- Storyboarding: This is the phase of the project where you sketch out all of the key moments, the overall story arc, planning out how the participant will get from point A to point B, as well as any important interactions or animations that might occur in between.
- Prototyping: It can be difficult to intuit what these spatial experiences will feel like, so it’s important to create a prototype of your plan (layout, interactions, etc.) so that you can test it in physical space.
- Designing & Creating Assets: Once you've tested your experience and you're happy with how the basic composition and the interactions are working, it's time to actually design and create your assets.
- Creating an AR scene: Once your assets have been created, it’s time to import them and lay them out in Adobe Aero’s 3D workspace. Starting your designs on the desktop version, followed by testing on a mobile device, allows for easy importing and precision while ensuring that the composition is working in the physical world.
- Adding Animations & Interactions: Once your layout is completed, it’s time to add custom animations and interactions using The Behavior Builder.
- Testing: When the project is complete, double-check all of the final details. Look at the composition from multiple angles, test on different mobile devices, and perform user testing. This will ensure that your project is ready to share with others.
- Sharing With Others: To share your experience, simply click on the share icon and it will generate a URL and QR code. When your audience opens that link on a mobile device, it will launch Aero and start your experience.
Augmented Reality Best Practices
Best practices for creating successful augmented reality experiences, including onboarding & safety tips.
What you learned: Creating successful augmented reality experiences.
- Always design for safety and comfort. Don’t needlessly cover huge portions of the real world. It can be disorienting and may create hazards.
- Onboarding is especially important since this is a brand new medium. Many people have never used AR before, so you need to design with beginners in mind.
- Try to keep your overall file size lower than 50 MB.
- Users can become fatigued when using AR for extended periods. So, try to keep it short and sweet.
- Don’t recreate VR in AR. Meaning, don’t completely overwrite the physical world. Leverage it. That’s what AR does. It augments reality.
Best Practices for using 2D in Augmented Reality
Learn tips, tricks, & best practices for using 2D images & animations in AR scenes.
What you learned: Best practices when using 2D images and animations in AR.
- JPG compression can help you keep your file sizes down.
- Due to the way computers (and graphics cards) process data, it’s often a good idea to use power of two images. A power of two image is one that has an aspect ratio of 1:1 or 2:1, where the sides are either a multiple of 2 or 8.
- 2D animations are imported as a PNG sequence that is then zipped into an archive. The files can get large, so try to keep your file dimensions and frame rates as low as possible (while maintaining fidelity.)
- If you use photoshop files that contain layers in Aero, it will automatically create an illustration with depth. Simply drag and drop the PSD file onto Aero’s 3d workspace, then adjust the layer spacing in the properties panel.
Best Practices for using 3D in Augmented Reality
Learn tips, tricks, & best practices for using 3D models, materials, & animations in AR scenes.
What you learned: Tips and tricks for using 3D assets in AR.
- Aero currently supports models with up to 130K Polygons, but remember that the simpler your model is, the better it will perform.
- I always apply scale, rotation, and position before creating any animations. This ensures that your origin (where your model is anchor is set to 0,0 and all animations will have the appropriate starting and stopping points.
- If I’m using a material that has textures, I try to minimize my file sizes by using compressed JPGs and power of two images.
- Some more advanced materials (also known as shaders) aren’t currently supported by Aero.
- Armatures are a collection of bones that control animations for specific parts of 3d models. They are the most efficient way to use 3d animations in AR.
- Bake your 3D animations prior to exporting them.
- GLBs are often smaller than FBX and work well within Aero.
