These experimental Adobe Projects could revolutionise video editing and online shopping

Adobe Sneaks has become something of an institution at its various events throughout the year. And that was certainly the case with the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas this week, where attendees were given a sneak peek at some experimental projects.

If you haven’t heard of it, Sneaks is kind of like Adobe’s answer to Google’s ‘20% Project’ time. This is where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their paid work hours creating side projects. Both Google AdSense and Gmail were born out of this system.

Unfortunately it was officially discontinued back in 2013.

Other large tech companies have trialled similar side project time, including Apple and Atlassian.

On the Adobe front, its employees are given the opportunity to work on future technology projects that may someday be weaved into Adobe’s suite of products.

Employees then vote on submissions and the top seven were presented at the Adobe Summit Sneaks Event — which was hosted by comedian Tig Notaro.

Off the back of Adobe’s AI announcements this year, the Sneaks entries had a particular focus on utilising AI and augmented reality to anticipate customer needs and provide personalised experiences.

Out of the seven, there were two in particular that stood out to yours truly.

Adobe Custom Clips

This one is specifically for marketers working with videos tailored towards specific audience segments.

The idea is to cut down on video editing time by utilising analytics and past performance data. From there it can modify and edit footage automatically to suit a particular audience for the campaign. It does this by using Adobe’s just-announced Sensei AI.

In the demonstration, the presenter was able to trim a 60-second commercial into a 15-second spot targeting loyal customers. They then repeated the process, targeting new customers instead, with the program cutting the video down differently.

In another demonstration, they showed the tech changing the video editing choices from the same stock of footage, depending on two different audience segments — city dwellers and outdoor lovers. It was genuinely very impressive.

True Colors

We can forgive the American spelling of this one since the tech is so damn cool.

The True Colors project works with the Adobe Commerce website and aims to help shoppers find clothing in colour palettes that best suit their personal look.

Anyone who is across colour theory, particularly in fashion, is aware that ‘having your colours’ done and being subscribed a season (cool autumn, warm summer, etc) can be an expensive process.

Instead, True Colour lets a user take and upload a photo that will be analysed by Sense AI to determine their facial features, undertones and more. It has also been trained to take a large variety of skin tones into account.

From there it will determine the best colours for the shopper and automatically filter online shopping sites for products in those colours only.

The demonstration (where host Tig Notaro was the real-time guinea pig) was extremely cool. The filtering in particular seemed extremely useful when it comes to saving time shopping online. I personally loved it.

The author travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Adobe.