Frame June Update: Snap-to-Wall Mode, Larger 3D Models, and More!

Greetings! We have some updates that we're excited to share with you. Also, in an email that went out to our users today, I talked about our upcoming pricing plans. I'm going to publish that on our blog in the weeks ahead, but the short version of it is that we plan on launching our pricing plans for FRAME in a month or so. Existing users will barely have any disruption in Frames they have already made, and there will still be a robust free plan (and a more robust free plan for teachers) available with the plans!

For now, let's dive into the updates. It's only a few of them, but they are mighty.

Snap-to-Surface Mode

We know that it can be hard to attach an asset to a wall or any other surface in your Frames. You typically have to drag the asset around with you or use the gizmo arrows and then do a bit of tweaking to get it "just right". Now, when you turn on Edit Mode and click on an image, PDF, video, whiteboard, or streaming screen, you will see a new toggle in the Edit Menu called "Snap to Surface". If you turn that on, and then click on a surface in your Frame environment, the environment will just snap right to it. In the GIF above, you can see I snap an image to a screen. The GIF cuts out before I then snap it right to one of the trees!

This is a helpful feature and we think it will save you a lot of time. It was also one of the first contributions by our new intern, Ademola Adenekan. Ademola is a student from Canada and it's wonderful to have him as a new team member. He's already working on some other cool features we're excited to share with you later. This is one step on our journey to make editing Frames even simpler.

Larger 3D Models

You can now import larger 3D model files into FRAME. We have a new optimization process which applies some geometry and texture compression to the model to help get it down to size. On some models, the optimization techniques won't work, at which point you can try to bring them in normally. For many models, though, this gets them in a state where they can then be imported into FRAME. We don't yet have this pipeline for the "upload your own environment" feature, but we're working on it.

We know that models come in all shapes and sizes, and our optimization technique sometimes causes some unexpected artifacts or visuals. We expect that some textures will occasionally look a bit less crisp, but please let us know if you are noticing anything really strange or undesired. We expect that we will need to tweak our optimization pipeline in the weeks ahead as we gather feedback from you all about how it's working. We've tried it with plenty of models, though, and we've been really pleased with what we've seen.

Odds and Ends

Stability: If your internet goes out but quickly comes back while you're in the middle of a FRAME session, we will try to reconnect you automatically instead of requiring a refresh to rejoin the session. If you change your Wifi network, though, you will still get an error and will need to refresh. If you're disconnected for longer than 12 seconds, you also probably won't make it back in without a refresh.

Scene Deleting: Only people who are admins or members of a Frame can delete scenes now. Those with edit permissions can still create scenes and tweak them, but they can't delete scenes.

Island and Campus: Ever tried to wander across the rocky path on the island environment and been blocked? Try again! Also, the campus environment has slightly improved performance.

More soon about our upcoming pricing plans, more sweet features, and other thoughts about immersive collaboration.
‍