Adobe recently released a video in which it showed off forward-looking features for its suite of apps on the tablet. In the video, you see a woman manipulating a chair’s orientation just by twisting her hand in the air, you see paint being splattered from a smartphone onto a tablet and a circular vector drawing bending a line in real time. It looks like The Future, and technically it is. But in many ways, what Adobe is showing us is already the present.

“There’s nothing in that video that we couldn’t do,” says Michael Gough, vice president of Experience Design at Adobe. “There are some things that would be time consuming or expensive to do, but there’s no fantasy in it. It’s just a question of, are any of them compelling enough that we need to do them right now and get them to our customers?”

Adobe has been making a major push into the mobile space, releasing new smartphone apps and adapting many of its cornerstone programs for use on tablets. The video was produced to show off what’s possible on the Microsoft Surface Pro, and it’s a glimpse of what Adobe believes to be the future of interaction when makers aren’t bound to a keyboard and mouse. “It’s an incredible innovation release when suddenly we can interact in the way we were trained a generation ago to interact with analog tools,” says Gough.

We’ve already seen how natural interaction— things like touching, gesturing and using hardware tools like digital pens and brushes—opens up an entirely new way to create stuff. Adobe is betting that it will make the process more accessible to people who’ve maybe never considered themselves creative. “It’s a long term vision, but we envision Photoshop being as easy to use as analog tools are,” he says. Instead of spending hours learning pre-computed paths, altering a photo could and should be intuitive. Gough likes to use the example of creating a new Word document verses turning the page in a physical notebook. One is learned, one is natural. “We don’t have to dumb things down,” he says. “They just become more expressive because they’re more natural to interact with.”

The big challenge here is making software that’s relevant for both novices and professionals. What you gain in expressivity, you might lose in precision when working on a tablet. This balance leads us into a time where cross-device creation is becoming more relevant. A designer might perform certain tasks on her mobile devices—things like grabbing colors or tracing shapes— and transfer that content to the desktop to work in a more robust environment.

For right now, most of the features you see in the video are deep in development mode. They’re bits and pieces of what Gough and his team have been working on in their innovation lab. Some might see the light of day eventually, while others might forever remain a pet project. “We constantly have a pile of innovations lying around that our customers haven’t seen,” he says. “What we’re capable of doing and what we actually ship, there’s a pretty huge gap.”