Adobe has previewed 10 experimental AI tools at its MAX conference, showing how creators might soon talk to the characters they design, walk through their photographs in three dimensions, and copy an edit across a whole shoot in one step.

The projects were shown at the annual MAX Sneaks session in Miami Beach on 11 November, hosted by actor Terry Crews. Sneaks is the part of the conference where Adobe's researchers show work still in the lab, and the company makes no promise that any of the projects will become a finished product.

Talking characters and walk-through photos

Two projects drew the most attention. Project Screen Test lets a creator design a fictional character by conversation: set a few base traits, such as anxious or shy, pick a voice, then chat with the character to fill in its backstory, fears, movement quirks and goals, before rendering animated screen tests of that persona in a described scene. Adobe describes it as directing the future of video, and Unite.AI reports that for now it is a standalone creative exercise, with no confirmed place inside Adobe's existing video tools.

Project Sight Span takes a flat photograph, painting or illustration and builds a navigable three-dimensional environment around it, generating plausible objects and background beyond the original frame so a creator can move through the scene and reframe shots. CNET, reporting from the show, compared the effect to Apple's spatial reframing of photos.

Sound, edits and painting

The other projects cover the rest of the creative workflow. Project Sound Bender generates and shapes sound effects, Project Rinse Repeat copies a Photoshop edit from one subject to others automatically, Project Deep Brush paints colour onto curved surfaces in a photo while preserving light and shadow, and Project Scene Sweep applies an edit consistently across cuts and camera angles in a sequence.

For the first time, Adobe is letting people try some of the research themselves. A new Adobe Labs Playground offers early previews of two of this year's Sneaks, Project Deep Brush and Project Hands On, plus a preview of Project Custom Filters, a capability being explored for Photoshop.

Experiments, not products

None of the 10 projects carries a release date, and Adobe has not committed to shipping any of them. That is the point of Sneaks: past demonstrations have later surfaced as shipping features, but the session is a look at where Adobe's research is heading, not a product launch. The conference itself runs in Miami from 10 to 12 November, with the online programme on 10 and 11 November.