Sometimes you have to trust your gut when you launch a new app, believing that if it’s good enough people are going to find out about it. Other times, the demand is so great that you quite literally can’t ignore the clamor.
This second scenario is the one that 34-year-old artist, designer, and programmer Cyril Diagne recently found himself in. After showing off one of the coolest AR demos seen in ages on Twitter, he was inundated with requests to turn the futuristic “copy and paste” demo into a real app. Less than two weeks later, Diagne has done exactly that.
4/10 – Cut & paste your surroundings to Photoshop
Code: https://t.co/cVddH3u3ik
Book: @HOLOmagazine
Garment: SS17 by @thekarentopacio
Type: Sainte Colombe by @MinetYoann @ProductionType
Technical Insights: ↓#ML #AR #AI #AIUX #Adobe #Photoshop pic.twitter.com/LkTBe0t0rF— Cyril Diagne (@cyrildiagne) May 3, 2020
“AR Copy Paste is an application for Android and iOS that lets you capture objects and photographs and transfer them to your computer in a few seconds,” Diagne, who is currently in residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab in Paris, told Cult of Mac. “The process uses modern developments in machine learning to automatically detect objects and people and remove the background. Thanks [to] AR, the process is extremely simple and only requires one touch.”
Copy and paste: The next generation
As I wrote when the app was just a cool demo, the app essentially allows designers to pull objects from the real world and drop them into other applications. It works by figuring out which object you want to “lift” from the real world. It then uses image recognition to separate it from its backdrop layer. You can drop the resulting image into Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator, along with Figma, GIMP, Sketch, Powerpoint, and Keynote.
“This app is the result of a series of experimentations I’m doing every week to explore how machine learning can help make our interactions with the digital world more natural,” Diagne said. “I’m fascinated by the incredible machine learning models that are being open sourced on Github every week by the most talented researchers. These a true goldmine for designers who can use them to reinvent the way we interact with computers and machines.”
You can currently sign up to join the early access beta waiting list for AR Copy and Paste. You can check out more information here.
