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.