Adobe’s annual tradition of “sneaks” shows possible new features coming to the Creative Cloud

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posted Wednesday, October 17, 2018 at 1:10 PM EDT

 
 

Every year at Adobe MAX, a time is set aside for selected developers at Adobe to show new technology concepts that they and their teams have been working on. It's called "Sneaks," and Adobe describes it as "representing explorations and emerging technologies that may or may not be released as a product or product feature in the future." Though not everything shown at Sneaks makes it into a public release, some features have been shown go public as soon as six months later, which means if it looks like something the broader public is interested in, Adobe is well-positioned to push it live. 

The one that piqued my interest was called "Moving Stills," and it enables any photograph to be turned into a live photo. It works by animating the image in 3D, and then simulating the realistic effect of flying through the scene. Check it out:

The other nine Sneaks previewed at MAX are as follows:

1. Brush Bounty

Summary: Enables application of simple motion to illustrations using brushes that can create movement while you sketch or paint.

2. Project Smooth Operator

Summary: Automatically re-crops a video to multiple new aspect ratios, all while keeping what is interesting or important inside the frame.

3. Fantastic Fold

Summary: A tool that analyzes a dieline and automatically determines the folded 3D shape, as well as an interactive mapping between the 2D and 3D representations.

4. Project Waltz

Summary: A mobile companion app to control 3D virtual cameras, allows for precise and natural camera motions.

5. Fontphoria

Summary: A glyph morphing and generation system that smartly manages the representation of a glyph smoothly without creating/modifying any font and generates complete alphabets and fonts captured from a single letter glyph or word/phrase.

6. Project Fast Mask

Summary: A new technique for video object cutout using deep networks that enables users to select a target object with a small number of clicks/scribbles and propagates the target object mask throughout entire video frames accurately.

7. Project Model Morph

Summary: An easy and intuitive tool for editing 3D man-made objects.

8. Project Kazoo

Summary: A new invention that turns your voice into music.

9. Project Good Bones

Summary:This solution enables intuitive and shape-aware editing of complex vector graphics objects via automatically added segment handles and ‘bones’ connecting them creating a skeleton.

What do you think? Any of these Sneaks stand out? Let us know in the comments below.