Formerly known as “Project Puppetron” (see previous re: the underlying tech), Adobe’s new Characterizer will soon be part of Character Animator CC:

You will be able to bring original art into Character Animator, record a series of sounds and facial expressions, and Characterizer will generate a new unique character… In a matter of seconds, you have a completely unique puppet that’s ready for your performance, regardless of your previous animation experience.

Here’s a quick tour from my buddy Dave:

Meanwhile After Effects is adding some fun new chops to its puppeting toolset:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

“Teaching Google Photoshop” has long been my working mantra here—i.e. getting computers to see like artists & wield their tools. In a similar vein, researchers from Adobe & MIT have teamed up on “An AI for CGI“—tech that automatically separates image elements in discreet regions for augmentation. I can’t wait to give it a try:

[YouTube]

Laan Labs, you’re blowing my mind:

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Holy sh!t 💥 Laan Labs is developing an #augmentedreality #3D scanning app that lets you cut + paste reality. Share scans with iMessage & view in #AR on #iOS12. Unreal. No, too real! 🎥: Laan Labs

A post shared by Augmented Human (@augmentedhuman) on Sep 6, 2018 at 2:08pm PDT

[Via Luca Prasso]

…because it’s 2018 and that’s just the kind of sentence one types now. But seriously, this thing is kinda bonkers:

[YouTube]

Days of miracles & wonder, man.

I’ve certainly found our Home devices handy when helping our boys with their Spanish homework.

Family members in bilingual homes often switch back and forth between languages, and now the Assistant can keep up. With our advancement in speech recognition, you can now speak two languages interchangeably with the Assistant on smart speakers and phones and the Assistant will respond in kind. This is a first-of-its-kind feature only available on the Assistant and is part of our multi-year effort to make your conversations with the Assistant more natural.

[YouTube]

Zozo Suit Riot: This startup wants you to put on a stretchy, instrumented shirt & then scan your body in order to get custom-tailored clothes:

Would you do it? Will others? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess we’ll find out.

[YouTube]

Oohrah:

Starting today, service members can search ‘jobs for veterans‘ on Google and then enter their specific military job codes (MOS, AFSC, NEC, etc.) to see relevant civilian jobs that require similar skills to those used in their military roles. We’re also making this capability available to any employer or job board to use on their own property through our Cloud Talent Solution.

[YouTube]

This tech is utterly bonkers. Jump ahead to 2:13 or so for the real hotness.

I will go to my grave unable to hear “Everybody Dance Now” without thinking of Borat:

You are most welcome!

[YouTube]

This 💩 is 🍌🍌🍌, B-A-N-A-N-A-S: This Video-to-Video Synthesis tech apparently can take in one dance performance & apply it to a recording of another person to make her match the moves:

It can even semantically replace entire sections of a scene—e.g. backgrounds in a street scene: 

Now please excuse me while I lie down for a bit, as my brain is broken.

[YouTube]

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via Tyler Zhu]

Hah—brilliant: SnotBot is a hexacopter drone covered in petri dishes that collects whale exhalations for science:

Popular Science explains:

Whale snot, it turns out, is packed with DNA, viruses, hormones, and microbes—all incredibly useful things to a variety of scientists.

Typically, marine biologists employ the same techniques that failed Kerr: A motorboat equipped with long sticks and modified crossbows to collect whale biopsies. But Kerr hopes these flying research robots will soon change that.

[YouTube 1 & 2]