I got a fever, and the only prescription… is more Bollywood.
Come, my friend, rest your mind with absurd autonomous mens’ fashion, as glimpsed by our delighted family while watching Dabaang 2 this past weekend:
[YouTube]
Cripes (both the spread & the degree to which we’re all tracked):
Using cellphone location data from just the phones of the people gathered on a single beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this video shows just how far those people spread across the country when they went home, possibly taking SARS-CoV-2 with them. They go everywhere. [Via]
[YouTube]
Like a lot of folks I’m now constantly streaming video down & up while working from home, alongside a wife who’s doing the same plus a couple of kids using online learning (and, let’s be honest, a lot of YouTube & Xbox). Freeing up bandwidth to improve these experiences would be great, so I was delighted to learn that our Nest cameras can be scheduled to stop/start streaming video up to the cloud. From the Google help center:
- Lower the setting so that your camera isn’t using as much data to stream video to the cloud.
- Schedule your camera to turn off at certain times, particularly if you have a Nest Aware subscription, so your camera isn’t constantly uploading video to the Nest service. You can also try this if you’re sharing your camera publicly.
Thanks for thinking ahead, Nest team!
On a much lighter note than yesterday’s ghost-town SF vid:
https://twitter.com/chanian/status/1242897557463773186?s=20
[Via Jim Goldstein]
Sadly (for our dog-walking boys), I think our man Seamus might be a bit big for this:
Way to go, Sundar & team—I’m really happy to see all this news, including the following:
In addition to these commitments, we also increased the gift match Google offers every employee annually to $10,000 from $7,500. That means our employees can now give $20,000 to organizations in their communities, in addition to the $50 million Google.org has already donated.
Join my old friends & colleagues Phil Clevenger & Rick Miller tomorrow for what promises to be an informative online class/discussion. Topics include:
- Quick history of the Lightroom UI and its influence on modern software design
- The importance of choosing the right color space when editing your photos.
- Creating custom camera profiles for your DSLR, cellphone, and drone cameras to achieve the best color fidelity.
- The RAW advantage: recovering data from overexposed/underexposed images.
- Using the Map module and GPS coordinates for location scouting.
- Soft Proofing your photos to determine the most appropriate print color settings
- Questions & Answers
About your hosts:
Phil Clevenger:
Senior Director, Experience Design, Adobe Experience Cloud. Original UI designer for Adobe Lightroom and author on two patents for UI innovations in the Lightroom 1.0 interface.Rick Miller:
Former Sr. Solutions Engineer/color management expert at Adobe Systems (Rick’s name appeared on the credit screens for Photoshop and Premiere Pro), Professional photographer, and currently a professor at USC. Rick previously taught at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Cal Poly Pomona University, and assisted the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division in the forensic application of Photoshop.
I swear, the paste-licking sequence contained more genuine suspense than any Star Wars prequel or sequel.
[YouTube]
A couple of years ago, Adobe unveiled some really promising style-transfer tech that could apply the look of oil paintings to animated characters:
I have no idea whether it uses any of the same tech, but now 8th Wall is bringing a similar-looking experience to augmented reality via an entirely browser-based stack—very cool:
Augmented Reality makes Geena Davis, Ava DuVernay and others come to life from the canvas powered by @the8thwall pic.twitter.com/rihdBCkpdV
— VR/AR Association VRARA (@thevrara) March 25, 2020
[YouTube]
Here’s a much-needed mental palate cleanser:
Nick Heath narrates his videos of people doing mundane things, like crossing the street, with the verve and dramatic flair of competitive sports.
They’re grouped via the #LiveCommentary tag. Enjoy some of my faves:
Dogging.#LifeCommentary #LiveCommentary pic.twitter.com/BuRkVWAGjX
— Nick Heath (@nickheathsport) March 21, 2020
Football. Live. Well, a football.#TootingCommon #LifeCommentary #LiveCommentary pic.twitter.com/Nvs92Etkz0
— Nick Heath (@nickheathsport) March 17, 2020
After the lunch break now…
2020 Crossroad Dash. Live.#LifeCommentary #LiveCommentary pic.twitter.com/QFkW0SUqy8
— Nick Heath (@nickheathsport) March 17, 2020
Middle Class Arena. LIVE.#LifeCommentary #LiveCommentary https://t.co/jokricAmLd pic.twitter.com/KSlEbQezox
— Nick Heath (@nickheathsport) March 18, 2020
It’s really cool to see companies stepping up to help creative people make the most of our forced downtime. PetaPixel writes,
If you’re a photographer stuck at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, Professional Photographers of America (PPA) has got your back. The trade association has made all of its 1,100+ online photography classes free for the next two weeks. […]
You can spend some of your lockdown days learning everything from how to make money in wedding photography to developing a target audience to printing in house.
Meanwhile Unity is opening up their Learn Premium curricula:
During the COVID-19 crisis, we’re committed to supporting the community with complimentary access to Unity Learn Premium for three months (March 19 through June 20). Get exclusive access to Unity experts, live interactive sessions, on-demand learning resources, and more.
“This is certainly the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on, and it might be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.”
My Google Research colleague Jon Barron routinely makes amazing stuff, so when he gets a little breathless about a project, you know it’s something special. I’ll pass the mic to him to explain their new work around capturing multiple photos, then synthesizing a 3D model:
I’ve been collaborating with Berkeley for the last few months and we seem to have cracked neural rendering. You just train a boring (non-convolutional) neural network with five inputs (xyz position and viewing angle) and four outputs (RGB+alpha), combine it with the fundamentals of volume rendering, and get an absurdly simple algorithm that beats the state of the art in neural rendering / view synthesis by *miles*.
You can change the camera angle, change the lighting, insert objects, extract depth maps — pretty much anything you would do with a CGI model, and the renderings are basically photorealistic. It’s so simple that you can implement the entire algorithm in a few dozen lines of TensorFlow.
Check it out in action:
[YouTube]
If you’re on an iPhone or compatible Android device, try watching this video in the YouTube app to see what my team has cooked up around virtual makeup try-on (complementing the lipstick try-ons we launched a while back):
[YouTube]
I’m in good spirits at the moment, but sometimes I like my humor pitch dark, and the rattling of our previously placid world got me thinking back to Saturday Night Live’s old “Wake Up & Smile!” bit. Nice that the keywords helpfully include “Wake Up and Smile breakdown, Lord of the Flies.” Enjoy?
These loving treatments of 1-star reviews of natural treasures are pretty wonderful:
[D]esigner Amber Share decided to create a series of hilarious travel posters for all 61 parks, featuring the Internet’s funniest, snarky comments.
Share came up with the idea for her Subpar Parks series as a way to “put a positive, fun spin on such a negative mindset.” Each retro-style poster design features colorful graphic renditions of America’s mountains, lakes, and forests. However, each pretty scene is matched with hand lettering that spells out the bad reviews.
Happy St. Paddy’s, all! Getting stuck inside sucks, but happily a great new Ronan Boyle book just dropped from Thomas Lennon & John Hendrix! Even our grumpy 12yo Finn (a huge fan of the first installment) had to smile at that—Begorrah! 😌☘️
I’m grateful to my onetime-Klingon buddy RC & many friends at Adobe for pushing this through. Per PetaPixel:
In response to requests from educators, Adobe has announced that it will be providing free at-home access to Creative Cloud apps to those students who usually only have access on-campus. It’s one way the software maker is trying to empower students to keep learning amid campus closures caused by the novel coronavirus. […]
Higher education and K-12 institutions that pay for on-campus access for their students simply need to request “temporary ‘at-home’ access” through this link. Once verified, access will be granted, free of charge, through May 31st, 2020.
Good God, something like 777 million kids who’d normally be in school are stuck at home right now. Our fam is among those affected, so my blogging will be hit-or-miss as we try to figure out what to do with the Micronaxx.
Fortunately lots of folks are stepping up with resources. YouTube Learning has posted a hub featuring tips for studying at home, plus topics like physics, algebra, robotics, and more. Elsewhere Khan Academy has suggested daily schedules for kids 4-18, and our school district has posted a crowdsourced list of educational resources.
HTH & good luck out there, gang. Please feel free to share via comments any useful resources you find.
TBH the last thing I want is for coronavirus talk to infect (ahem) my escapist art-posting, but I’ve gotta give Markus Hofstätter props for the sheer effort he put into making this 7-frame animation with archaic tintype printing (or as my wife asked, lacking all context, “Why did that dude put a picture into a panini press?”). You can watch his process from the beginning (and check out PetaPixel for the full story), or just jump to the finished animation at the end:
[YouTube]
Enjoy this much-needed mix of levity & practicality, generously seasoned with profanity:
[YouTube] #FlattenTheCurve
I’m pleased to have played an extremely tiny role in making this augmentation of restaurant search possible:
Tapping on a given item will show the dish, along with pictures also taken by customers. You can then choose to search for that dish to see what it is, or use Google Translate to display it in your native language.
Hmm—apparently Ricoh (maker of my O.G. Theta 360 camera) is planning to spin off a new company to make tiny, consumer cams. I wonder, do normal folks see enough value in making tiny planets or in posting interactive panos to make this take off? I guess we shall see.
[YouTube]
So cool! I’d never actually watched these Apollo 16 clips on their own, unedited & with original dialog intact.
PetaPixel writes,
For this particular project, Shiryaev used the stabilized version of the footage that NASA itself released in July of 2019 as a baseline. He then fed it through the same AI software that he’s been using to upscale all of the videos he’s released: Google’s DAIN interpolate frames and achieve 60fps, and Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel AI to upscale each frame and achieve 4K resolution.
More about the mission from NASA:
RIP Max von Sydow, who delivered one of my favorite pitch-black comedic minutes in the history of cinema:
[YouTube]
[Please note: I don’t work on the Pixel team, and these opinions are just those of a guy with a couple of phones in hand, literally shooting in the dark.]
In Yosemite Valley on Friday night, I did some quick & unscientific but illuminating (oh jeez) tests shooting with a Pixel 4 & iPhone 11 Pro Max. I’d had fleeting notions of trying some proper astrophotography (side note: see these great tips from Pixel engineer & ILM vet Florian Kainz), but between the moon & the clouds, I couldn’t see a ton of stars. Therefore I mostly held up both phones, pressed the shutter button, and held my breath.
Check out the results in this album. You can see which camera produced which images by tapping each image, then tapping the little comment icon. I haven’t applied any adjustments.
Overall I’m amazed at what both devices can produce, but overall I preferred the Pixel’s interpretations. They were darker, but truer to what my eyes perceived, and very unlike the otherworldly, day-for-night iPhone renderings (which persisted despite a few attempts I made to set focus, then drag down the exposure before shooting).
Check out the results, judge for yourself, and let me know what you think.
Oh, and for a much more eye-popping Pixel 4 result, check out this post from Adobe’s Russell Brown:
I’m a huge fan of Preet Bharara and his indispensable podcast, so it was a real pleasure to hear our old Adobe collaborator Dr. Hany Farid discuss the world of deepfakes, weaponized imagery, and what we can do about it. I think you’ll find it really interesting & valuable.
Oh man—from throat-coating butter cookies & iPhone villainy to gate weave and “eat shit,” this generously detailed tour from director Rian Johnson eats like a meal. I had no intention of watching the whole thing, yet I was shocked when it was over. I could’ve watched a craftsman detail his (and others’) loving craft all day. Enjoy!
[YouTube]
Yeesh—talk about bittersweet at best:
He first appears as a crude collection of 3-D pixels—or voxels. Soon, he looks like a conglomeration of blocks morphing into the shape of an animal. Gradually, his image evolves until he becomes a sharp representation of a northern white rhino, grunting and squealing as he might in a grassy African or Asian field. There comes a moment—just a moment—when the viewer’s eyes meet his. Then, the 3-D creature vanishes, just like his sub-species, which due to human poaching is disappearing into extinction.
Smithsonian continues,
The Mill, which has studios in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bangalore and Berlin, provided animation for this project, and Dr. Andrea Banino at DeepMind, an international company that develops useful forms of artificial intelligence, provided the experimental data to set the rhino’s paths. After each two-minute episode, the rhino reappears and follows another of the three programmed paths.
Exeunt. Sadness ensues. [Vimeo]
Vibe with the melancholic woodcuts in this short film:
[Vimeo]
What a fascinating 90-second peek into a clever trick that saved millions of dollars in production costs on Titanic. As a friend asks, “I wonder what became of all those reverse WHITE STAR LINE sweaters?”
the starboard side of the 90% scale ship was built for the film, but for the Southampton launch, which depicts the port side next to the doc, all props, costumes and signage were built flopped to double for the port side of the ship – the footage was then horizontally flopped pic.twitter.com/15llmvJ8z1
— Todd Vaziri (@tvaziri) February 29, 2020