Digital experiences have been the new norm in 2020. This year, MAX, Adobe’s major annual conference for creatives, went fully virtual. With more than 350 sessions and hundreds of speakers, the first-ever completely digital Adobe MAX inspired creatives around the globe.
A major highlight of this annual event was the Adobe MAX Sneaks session, where Adobe’s researchers and engineers present experimental and innovative technologies to a broad audience. This year, three sneaks were presented by Adobe Research. Here we take a sneak peek at these early-stage explorations that could help reimagine creative workflows in the future.
Project Physics Whiz
Stacking a pile of books or hanging a painting on a wall is easy to do in real life. However, creating these scenes using 3D tools can be a time-consuming task, which may involve numerous rotational and translational manipulations, as well as fine camera movements to ensure that objects don’t intersect in an unrealistic way. Project Physics Whiz frees creatives from this daunting work by automatically correcting object manipulations using real-time physics. With this technology, arranging objects in 3D can be as intuitive as it is in real world.
Presenter: Jui-Hsien Wang
Collaborators: Jérémie Dumas, Danny Kaufman
Project AR Together
Delivering a collaborative augmented reality (AR) experience across multiple devices has been challenging. It requires a consensus on the tracking of physical space across all the devices to achieve accurate positioning of virtual objects. Project AR Together solves this problem by using internal sensors on the devices and implementing machine learning algorithms to predict the relative positions of other participants. With this technology, sharing augmented experiences with others can be fun and seamless.
Presenter: Haoliang Wang
Collaborators: Stefano Petrangeli, Vishy Swaminathan, Na Wang
Project On the Beat
Can anyone become a dance pro? Well, it requires a lot of practice. How about becoming a dance pro in videos? Project On the Beat uses body trackers to track body motions and detect strong dance movements. It then uses a new method to synchronize music beats with human-motion beats presented in those video frames with the most intense dance movements. With this technology, creating dance music videos can be fun and fast for anyone.
Presenter: Yang Zhou
Collaborators: Jimei Yang, Deepali Aneja, Jun Saito, Dingzeyu Li
In additional to the sneaks, Adobe Research has also contributed to many other innovations showcased at MAX 2020, including the Neural Filters workspace, Sky Replacement, Refine Hair, and Object Aware Refine Mode in Photoshop, performance improvements in Photoshop, Liquid Mode in the Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app, a conversation about Adobe Sensei, and many more.
Check out the Adobe MAX 2020 website to watch recorded sessions while they are still available.
By Claire Qin Li, Adobe Research
