I awoke from a Bailey’s-tinged snooze a few months ago to behold Stephen Colbert interacting in realtime with a lurid, loudmouthed cartoon Donald Trump. Quickly I shot a note to my friends working on Adobe Character Animator: “Hey, have you guys seen this thing? I wonder what app they’re using.” “Uhh… {something something, we can neither confirm nor deny…}” they wrote back.

I’m delighted that the team can now take credit for powering this silliness—along with the recent live-animated Simpsons episode. Check out the Trump puppet in action:



They’ve also recently announced lots of improvements to the app. Here’s a taste:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

You can start to see why Google has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into these guys:

Per TechCrunch,

ILM & Magic Leap “are building a joint research lab, the “Collab Lab,” at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco campus…

“[B]efore magical realism becomes a seamless part of everyday life, it needs some advanced prototyping. Our ‘Collab Lab’ is a focal point of practical problem solving, concrete groundwork, sweat and hyper innovation.”

[YouTube]

Brutal & hilarious. :-p (Pairs well with that This American Life episode about teens & Instagram.)

[YouTube]

Head to photos.google.com/albums, click an image within an album, and choose “Slideshow” from the overflow menu (upper right corner). The team writes,

You like crowding friends and family around your computer or TV to show them photos of last weekend’s adventure. You don’t like clicking 132 times to show them each photo.

Luckily for you, it’s now possible to play a slideshow from any album. Just open the album, click on a photo, and select Slideshow from the dropdown menu.

For the ultimate viewing experience, cast the Chrome tab to your TV while you sit back, relax, and make everyone jealous with your amazing photos.

Slideshows are supported in Photos on Android as well.

Imagine watching a live ballgame while being able to fly around the field or court in VR, viewing the action from any angle.

That’s the sort of future that could be enabled by new research from Microsoft. A team there has devised a way to capture live performances, generate 3D models, and stream the results. Check it out:

The team writes,

We present the first fully automated end-to-end solution to create high-quality free-viewpoint video encoded as a compact data stream. Our system records performances using a dense set of RGB and IR video cameras, generates dynamic textured surfaces, and compresses these to a streamable 3D video format. Four technical advances contribute to high fidelity and robustness: multimodal multi-view stereo fusing RGB, IR, and silhouette information; adaptive meshing guided by automatic detection of perceptually salient areas; mesh tracking to create temporally coherent subsequences; and encoding of tracked textured meshes as an MPEG video stream. Quantitative experiments demonstrate geometric accuracy, texture fidelity, and encoding efficiency. We release several datasets with calibrated inputs and processed results to foster future research.

[YouTube] [Via Ben Grossman]

Check out a great demo from my pal Julieanne:

Now you can quickly correct perspective in a photograph with precision and control using the new Transform Panel, Guided Upright tool, and Offset sliders. Watch as Julieanne demonstrates how to manually position guides to automatically correct converging vertical and horizontal lines in images, which can then be repositioned within the canvas area.

The features are available now, and you can find a bit more info via the Lightroom Journal [YouTube]

Remember how I asked recently how soon we’d see real-life AR makeup? Yeah, didn’t take long:

There’s “working at Google” and then there’s (cue booming, serious voice) “working at Google.” I’m certainly doing the former, dramatically less impressive sort; these brainiacs are evidently next door at Moffett Field doing the latter*. Maybe after a few (dozen) more watchings I’ll start to grok more about Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab—but in the meantime, it remains an interesting bit of storytelling:

*This morning I heard James Corden describe sitting next to Chris Hemsworth and thinking, “Okay, technically we’re from the same species, but come on…” :-p

[YouTube]

Intel has acquired some very impressive 3D technology tailored to sports broadcasting:

Replay’s freeD technology created a 3D video rendering of the entire court using 28 ultra-HD cameras placed around the area. Those cameras were connected to Intel servers, which then allowed broadcasters to transmit the contest from various angles and give fans a 360-degree view of the dunks.

I wonder to what extent this’ll take off. A lot of sports fans I know are lazy bastards who won’t want this sort of active involvement in the content. I always think of the Onion’s goof on Doritos—”‘cuz you’re too biz-zay for chewin’!”

Now, I can imagine a couple of very compelling sports-related experiences:

• You don goggles & see a huge phalanx of big screens, each presenting a different game (think: a shitty efficiency apartment suddenly puts Dave & Buster’s to shame*), and you’re able to flit among them while getting a steady stream of news, hot chicks (because why not?), and all the ads.
• One or more of these broadcasts augments its regular, curated 2D presentation with a bunch of 360º feeds shot from the sidelines, overhead, etc.
• Your coked-up magpie brain now flits among these at warp speed, perceiving only degrees of boredom.

So, good times, then. 🙂

J.

*Note: Dave & Buster’s, like Donald Trump, exists on a plane beyond shame, but that’s another matter.

[YouTube]