LOS ANGELES — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise appearance onstage during Monday's keynote presentation at Adobe's Max creativity conference.
He was there to reveal a new partnership between the companies aimed at bringing Adobe's powerful apps to the touch environment of Windows 8.1. One of those apps is the new Project Animal, an animation app with Kinect-like gesture and speech-recognition abilities.
Created by Adobe's After Effects team, Project Animal (Animal is a code name for the beta version of the software) allows users to create animated characters whose gestures and speech they can control using their device's webcam.
"By accessing your computer’s webcam, Project Animal will track the movement of your head, mouth, and eyes — including your blinking, glancing, and eyebrow raising — and move your puppet accordingly," Adobe wrote in a blog post. "When you talk, your character talks. When you feign surprise, so does your character. When you’re grumpy, your character is too."
It's not clear which devices Animal will eventually come to, but the demo was done on a Surface Pro 3. Both Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen made it clear the two companies are committed to bringing Adobe's software to Microsoft's touch platforms and working together on hardware/software combinations.
"There is new energy in terms of the partnership [between Microsoft and Adobe]," Nadella said. "At the very core of Microsoft, we are a company that builds platforms and productivity tools. For us, it's about being able to take the creative process and look at that process end to end across devices of all sizes."
Interested developers who are already Creative Cloud subscribers can sign up for the Project Animal beta on Adobe's website. Adobe didn't say when the full version would be available, but said it would be looking for feedback from early users first.
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