Facebook today announced that Adobethe company behind industry-leading creative tools like Photoshop, Premiere, and Substancehas acquired Oculus Medium, the companys VR sculpting tool.
3D modeling on a computer is notoriously abstract compared to working with a physical medium; with VRs unique, one-to-one perspective and input, Oculus set out to make a sculpting tool which would feel more like working with clay in the real world than drawing primitive shapes and vertices with a mouse.
Adobe is promising continuity in the way access and experience the tool; it remains available on the Oculus Store and will continue to be free for new activations of Oculus Touch.
Adobe says it cant wait to work with this community to keep Medium growing and improving, so at least outwardly, the company is signaling that this isnt a mere talent acquisition which would threaten to deprecateMediumand absorb its developers into other Adobe projects.
In the announcement shared by Oculus, the Mediumteam is calling this a new chapter for the tool, and says that users should stay tuned for more features, improvements, and other developments coming from Adobe in 2020 as Medium continues to evolve.
Mediumhas demonstrated itself as a unique and powerful creative tool, but this kind of product is quite far removed from Facebooks core business;Mediums ultimate potential may have been stifled by a lack of interest from the parent company, and in a worst-case scenario,Mediumlike Oculus Story Studiomight have been wound down and left to fade from existence.
Adobes entire business, on the other hand, is about making tools which empower artists and creators to produce great works.
But thinking a little further about the fact that Facebook is letting it goIm sure the program is too computationally intensive to run on the Quest, so, to me, its further indication that Facebook is abandoning the Rift S and PC based headsets.
Original article