Adobe's Hardware Experiments Are More Than Just Hobbies: Hands-On With Project Context

At its MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe showed ?quite a few products that will soon be available to its customers, but it also highlighted a number of hardware experiments, including Project Context, a totally re-imagined way for creating magazine layouts, as well as an advanced stylus and a ruler for touchscreens. After the keynote this morning, I had a chance to sit back with Adobe’s David Macy to talk about both the newly announced Mighty pen and Napoleon ruler for touchscreens, as well as Project Context. All of these projects are definitely more than just hobbies for Adobe, something Macy acknowledged when I asked him about the company’s plans for these tools. While Macy obviously wouldn’t talk about when (or even if) Adobe plans to turn these prototypes into products, my feeling was that the company is clearly thinking about it. It’s also clear that the Adobe XD team, which is behind all of these projects, has the backing to explore these ideas. The idea for the Mighty Pen, for example, was born about a year and a half ago and the team has been iterating on the idea ever since. Out of the three projects, Project Context is clearly the one that is the most “out there” right now. It’s easy to imagine Adobe selling pens and rulers, but when it comes to giant touchscreens, that’s not exactly the company’s core focus.?Right now Context is focused solely on magazine design, but because it runs on OS X (and actually uses two Macs for each screen), the system could be adapted for other uses as well (and Macy wouldn’t say if Wired or Conde Nast have any plans to use it in their actual production process). As Wired’s design director Claudia de Almeida noted when she demoed the project on stage today, layouts in newsrooms today are often still created physically with paper, scissors and boards where designers arrange their layouts. “The wonderful thing about Project Context,” she said, “is that it takes the best of what we do in the analog world and recreates it digitally.” That, of course, is also true of Adobe’s other two hardware projects. The Context system uses two 1080p high-def screens with a frame around it for picking up touch signals, as well as another screen set up as a Surface-like table in front of the other two screens. Because the screens

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