Adobe showed 10 AI experiments at Sneaks. Only two are shipping this week.
Project Screen Test, Sight Span, Sound Bender and Rinse Repeat were the stand-outs at Adobe MAX's annual research preview. History says most of them stay prototypes for years.
Adobe’s Sneaks panel at MAX 2026 ran Wednesday evening in Miami Beach, hosted by actor Terry Crews, and the company used it to preview 10 AI research projects, according to Variety. I watched the writeups pile up over the day and the number that stuck with me wasn’t 10. It was two: that’s how many of those 10 are getting a public release this week, on the relaunched Adobe Labs site, per CNET.
Sneaks has run every year since 2008. Adobe calls the showcased work “research previews,” not product commitments, and that caveat matters more than it sounds. Variety points out that two recent, now-shipped features, Generate Soundscape in Premiere and Relight in Photoshop, both started life as Sneaks demos years before anyone could use them. So a project landing on stage Wednesday says almost nothing about when, or whether, it reaches your copy of Photoshop.
The character you interview instead of prompt
The project getting the most attention, and the one The Verge’s reporter called the weirdest, is Project Screen Test. Instead of typing a description of how an AI character should sound and act, you talk to it. You start with a few personality traits, something like “anxious, shy, awkward,” give it a voice (a preset, a text description, or an uploaded sample), then have a FaceTime-style conversation with the character to build out its backstory, fears, goals and movement quirks. Once you’re happy with it, you describe a scene and the tool generates an animated screen test.
It’s a genuinely different interaction model from “describe a character in a prompt and hope,” and it’s aimed at video creators who need a consistent character across many shots, not a one-off image.
Walking into a photo that was never 3D
Project Sight Span takes a flat image, a photo, painting or illustration, and turns it into a 3D space you can walk through and reposition. The space fills in objects and backgrounds outside the original frame so they feel native to the image, even when you turn to look behind where the camera was standing. The Verge reports the generated areas look pixelated and rough at first, with full resolution restored only once you pick your final angle.
Sight Span can preserve a photo’s artistic style, and The Verge’s early testing found that repositioned tattoos and facial features stayed recognizable, which is the detail that usually breaks tools like this. Think of it as a far more aggressive version of the spatial reframing feature Apple showed for iOS photos earlier this year, with a full camera move instead of a small nudge.
Sound design on a color wheel
Project Sound Bender skips text-only audio prompting. You upload a video clip, describe the sound you want (“bubbling sci-fi cauldron noises” is the example Adobe demoed), and the tool generates matching sound effects synced to the footage. Then it hands you a square canvas, each corner tied to a different flavor of the same sound, dense gurgling in one corner, rumbling boiling rocks in another, and you drag your cursor around to blend them live.
Adobe’s Gautham Mysore, the senior principal scientist leading the company’s video and audio research, told The Verge the point isn’t to remove the sound designer’s judgment: “Sound Bender’s sonic exploration capability and Sight Span’s camera positioning are examples of how professionals could apply their judgment and refine a result more directly.” That’s a more modest pitch than most generative AI demos make, and it’s probably the more honest one for a tool aimed at working editors rather than casual users.
The one that copies your touch-up, not your pixels
Project Rinse Repeat is built into Photoshop and does something narrower but, for working retouchers, maybe more useful than the others: it copies an edit you’ve already made and applies it to other people or objects in the same photo. Airbrush out blemishes on one person in a group shot, and Rinse Repeat adapts that same fix to everyone else who needs it. Adobe says it also works on product shots, adding consistent shadows to objects of different shapes and sizes. Because it rebuilds the edits with native Photoshop tools rather than pasting pixels, the results stay fully editable afterward.
Two other projects from the day, Deep Brush (a context-aware brush that bends paint, text or objects to follow a surface’s geometry, demoed by research scientist Iliyan Georgiev) and a hand-tracking tool called Hands-On, are the two getting an actual public release this week on Adobe Labs, rather than staying stage demos.
| Project | What it does | Ships this week? |
|---|---|---|
| Project Screen Test | Build an AI character by talking to it, then generate animated screen tests | No, research preview only |
| Project Sight Span | Turn a flat photo into a navigable 3D scene | No, research preview only |
| Project Sound Bender | Generate and mix AI sound effects on a 2D canvas | No, research preview only |
| Project Rinse Repeat | Copy one Photoshop edit to matching objects or people | No, research preview only |
| Deep Brush | Context-aware brush that bends to a surface’s geometry | Yes, public release on Adobe Labs |
| Hands-On | Hand-tracking for creative tools | Yes, public release on Adobe Labs |
Note on sources: I read The Verge’s full report on Screen Test, Sight Span and Sound Bender, and CNET’s report on Deep Brush and the Adobe Labs relaunch, in full. I did not attend the Sneaks panel myself, so every quote and demo detail above is attributed to the outlet that was in the room.
Voice cloning inside Screen Test raises the same consent question a Tokyo court just answered for TikTok: see Japan’s ruling that a voice is protected like a face for what that means once a tool like this ships widely.
My read
The project most likely to show up in a shipped Adobe app within a year, going by Sneaks’ own history, isn’t the flashiest one. Rinse Repeat solves a dull, specific, recurring task that retouchers already do by hand, the same shape of problem that past Sneaks hits like content-aware fill solved before they became ordinary toolbar buttons. Screen Test and Sight Span are more impressive to watch in a five-minute demo, but they also ask Adobe to solve harder, open-ended generation problems before they’re reliable enough to ship, and that’s usually where Sneaks projects spend a few years.
I’d also flag the gap between “pixelated until you pick an angle” in Sight Span and the smooth navigation shown on stage. Live demos are curated. Worth checking the resolution quality yourself once, or if, Sight Span becomes something you can actually try.