Hey gang—I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. I really enjoyed getting away from the computer & spending time shivering with the fam out in gold country. 😌
Anyway, to ease back into posting, here’s a beautiful piece of work from creator Phil Letorneau:
Of the piece he writes, “100 stainless steel mirror-finish spheres suspended by nigh-invisible filament. Each sphere can be positioned independently to 0.05mm precision.” For more details check out this interesting Twitter thread:
What happens if you train an ML model from hundreds of thousands of 2D renders of 3D creature models? Glad you asked!
Today, we present Chimera Painter, a trained machine learning (ML) model that automatically creates a fully fleshed out rendering from a user-supplied creature outline. Employed as a demo application, Chimera Painter adds features and textures to a creature outline segmented with body part labels, such as “wings” or “claws”, when the user clicks the “transform” button.
Google and Lucasfilm have teamed up to bring iconic moments from the first season of “The Mandalorian” to life with “The Mandalorian” AR Experience (available on the Play Store for 5G Google Pixels and other select 5G Android phones) as fans follow the show’s second season.
The app uses ARCore’s new Depth API to enable occlusion for more realistic environmental interactions:
New content will keep rolling out in the app each week on Mando Mondays, so stay tuned—and Pixel owners should keep an eye out for additional exclusive content outside of the app as well.
I love learning about the visual language of filmmaking (e.g. 5 Classic Hollywood Aerial Shots), so I dig Steve Wright’s demonstrations of how to achieve cinematic results via a variety of cameras (including one’s phone) and gimbals:
David Salesin led Adobe Research for the better part of a decade, and now that he’s at Google, he & others have been collaborating with university researchers to enable fast, fun character animation:
As always I’m low-key embarrassed to find this stuff exciting, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The team writes,
Chrome now prioritizes your active tabs vs. everything that’s open—reducing CPU usage by up to 5x and extending battery life by up to 1.25 hours (based on our internal benchmarks).
Plus:
You can pin tabs (for those go-to pages), send tabs to your other devices and even group tabs in Chrome. This month we’re adding tab search to the toolbox.
You’ll now be able to see a list of your open tabs—regardless of the window they’re in—then quickly type to find the one you need. It’s search … for your tabs! The feature is coming first to Chromebooks, then to other desktop platforms soon.
Search has rolled out on Chrome OS & is due to come to other platforms soon.
Oh, and the “omnibox” (URL/search/dessert topping/floor wax) is learning to do new things you type in. Initial actions:
Artist Rudy Willingham has developed a clever, laborious way of turning video frames into physical cutouts & then overlaying them on interesting backgrounds. Check it out:
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I think I like this set even more:
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Lobe, the startup Microsoft acquired from UI star Mike Matas & co., offers a way to feed training data into an ML system via one’s browser. I have no idea how precise and/or general the applications could be, but regardless it makes for a fun & interesting demo.
I’m reminded of the phrase, “I don’t know karate, but I know ka-reepy!”
xpression camera is a virtual camera app that imprints the movements of your face and head onto anyone you want while you chat on Zoom, stream on Twitch, or create a YouTube video.
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Downside: You’re sticking it to the earth to the tune of 12mpg.
Upside: U-turn arrows are neatly curved!
Swapping out the traditional display area & presenting a camera feed—which can evidently feature night vision as well—is a clever alternative to projecting a washed-out HUD onto the windshield.
Visit this page in your mobile browser, or just take a peek (below) at the project, brought to you by the Google Arts & Culture Lab:
Some context for folks like me, who didn’t grow up with a connection to Indian traditions:
Diwali is the Indian festival of lights, usually lasting five days and celebrated during the Hindu Lunisolar month Kartika. One of the most popular festivals of Hinduism, Diwali symbolizes the spiritual “victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance”.
Crikey!
With AR on Google, you can meet eight life-sized Aussie animals up close and bring them into your backyard, living room, classroom—or take them on your adventures. Just search for koala, kangaroo, quokka, wombat, platypus, emu, kookaburra or echidna on your mobile browser (Android or iOS) or in the Google App and tap “View in 3D.”
I really enjoy Google’s super-cheeky internal discussion list, Terrible Ideas. Folks are celebrating one whale 🙄🤷🏻♂️ of a terrible idea, executed 50 years ago today. Behold, the exploding whale of Oregon:
Update: OMG, they’ve actually renamed the park “Exploding Whale Memorial Park.”
TL;DR: High quality storage will no longer be unlimited, but this won’t happen for a while; free storage remains a generous 15GB (more than enough for most people); and 100GB of storage costs two bucks a month.
Beginning June 1, any new photo or video uploaded in High quality in Google Photos will count toward your free 15 GB storage quota or any additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member. To make this transition easier, we’ll exempt all High quality photos and videos you back up before June 1. This includes all of the High quality photos and videos you currently store with Google Photos. Most people who back up in High quality should have years before they need to take action—in fact, we estimate that 80 percent of you should have at least three years before you reach 15 GB. You can learn more about this change in our Google Photos post.
Does this thing seem like the absolute best use of BMW’s R&D resources? Uhh… but hey, check out some wild camera angles & dramatic fly-bys:
Design Taxi writes,
The electric wingsuit is equipped with a rig on the chest, which provides an output of 15kW. This delivery is then split among two 7.5kW carbon impellers that can spin at the speed of 25,000 RPM and produce a thrust for around five minutes.
Remember the scene near the end of Swingers where Vince Vaughn’s character makes flirty baby faces at a woman—only to realize she was actually flirting with her actual baby?
Nata Metlukh brilliantly captures that kind of awkward moment in this series of charmingly animated vignettes:
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No AI can give me rhythm… or can it? Check out how the ‘Dobe is working to help synchronize body movements with beats:
I’m really pleased to see my last team’s engine (which is already powering makeup try-in in YouTube) getting put to good use:
L’Oréal Paris is also releasing one “exclusive look” on Google Duo, making it the first beauty brand to be used directly within Google’s video conference system.
It’ll be interesting to see how the market for digital makeup & apparel evolves in a more socially distant, WFH world.
I’m no connoisseur of the Grateful Dead or of NBA & sportscasting great Bill Walton, but having stumbled across this trippy hour-long doc the other night, I have to salute the good-hearted goofiness of both.
Bonus Waltonian goofiness:
Brief, beautiful choreography intertwines with particle effects in Barnaby Roper’s collaboration with dancer Kendi Jones, memorializing Elizabeth Eckford’s historic walk to school in 1957:
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With so many of us being nervous wrecks from election-related stress, I thought you might enjoy this small thing of beauty from the land of my ancestors. And may God hold us all in the palm of His hand.
Amazing Grace 🇺🇸 from across the Atlantic on the west coast of Ireland pic.twitter.com/b9wOiNZmwA
— Patrick Dexter (@patrickdextervc) November 3, 2020
Please, won’t you join me in enjoying the gourd-based cover of Toto that you can’t possibly have known you needed? 😌
Or if pastries are more your jam, donut mind giving this a listen:
Election mood. 🤞
“Let us to it pellmell. If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to Hell…” — Richard III
…or at least sufficiently indistinguishable from it.
Apple is adding a feature to help blind users detect the presence & distance of people:
Here’s how people detection works in iOS 14.2 beta – the voiceover support is a tiny bit buggy but still super cool https://t.co/vCyX2wYfx3 pic.twitter.com/e8V4zMeC5C
— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) October 31, 2020
I’m super interested in seeing how it may help regular people generate 3D models, though it remains to be seen what they’ll then do with them:
Recording memories will never be the same.
Captured in 5 seconds with #iPhone12Pro lidar
Processed in 20 seconds with https://t.co/md5CBwvTYnDirect export to @Sketchfab: https://t.co/sZNMJHoJGi
Happy birthday Olivia! pic.twitter.com/SG9JqZBaQe
— alban denoyel (@albn) October 31, 2020
Here’s the capture flow in 3D Scanner App: