Review restaurants, tourist spots, etc. to get free cloud storage and more. The Verge writes,
Guides who reach level two will get early access to new Google products and features, while level three participants will get a badge next to their name, indicating when a review or piece of information has been contributed by a trusted guide. But it’s level four that offers the most appealing prize, gifting Local Guides who reach that rank with 1 TB of Drive storage for free, an amount that’s worth $9.99 a month. In the wake of Microsoft’s recent rollbacks on OneDrive storage, this is one of the few ways to get a terabyte of cloud space for free. Those who ascend all the way to level five, after accumulating 500 points in the program, will be able to apply to attend the first Local Guides summit in 2016.
Congrats to all my colleagues on this great new launch! The team writes,
There were two features they kept coming back to: Communities, which now average 1.2 million new joins per day, and Collections, which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster.
Today, we’re starting to introduce a fully redesigned Google+ that puts Communities and Collections front and center. Now focused around interests, the new Google+ is much simpler.
For the more nerdily inclined, my boss Luke writes,
We moved to a mobile-first, responsive solution. Before home page weight: 22,600 KB After: 327 KB. And a much richer set of UI animations, transitions, & more. This is the same framework we launched on Google Photos earlier this year. Details here.
For $300 you’ll be able to turn your smartphone into a tabletop 3D scanner. That’s the promise, anyway, of Eora 3D, currently in its final push of Kickstarting. Check it out:
Google’s Steve Seitz & UW researchers first clustered 86 million photos into landmarks. Then, according to the project site,
We sort the photos by date and warp each photo onto a common viewpoint. Finally, we stabilize the appearance of the sequence to compensate for lighting effects and minimize flicker. Our resulting time-lapses show diverse changes in the world’s most popular sites, like glaciers shrinking, skyscrapers being constructed, and waterfalls changing course.
And now they’re able to give the results some 3D movement:
Recognizing that viewers are used to looking at faces and identifying subtle changes in expression, Disney states that their new software will be useful for their animation process as it can be used by anyone at any time. The software is also able to convert head-on face shots to side shots. The graphics capture every tiny wrinkle or expression that can eventually become an animated feature.
PS—Sorry for the weird formatting problems earlier. WordPress seems to have a bug where hitting Back on a newly edited post puts an older draft into the editor, leading to all kinds of chaos if you then edit & update. [YouTube]
Just this year, we saw a 5X growth in Arabic translations in Germany, which got us thinking about what we could do to make our products work better for Arabic speakers in these places. We’ve since added Arabic as our 28th language for instant visual translation, enabling immediate, offline translation of signs and other printed text from English or German to Arabic. We’re also asking anyone who knows the languages spoken by refugees or the countries they’re traveling through to help us improve translations through Google Translate Community.
This little round-up of non-CGI effects—from Star Wars to An American Werewolf in Paris to Terminator 2—is loaded with fun details, including a clever T2 deleted shot I’d never seen.
“This might be my all-time favorite press briefing I’ve done,” says David Lieb, who leads the PM team for Photos. Google granted the wish of 97-year-old Olive Horrell, who dreamed of being an engineer but was discouraged from pursuing that career. She recently visited campus, had her “mind blown” by Photos, tried her hand at drawing a Google Doodle, and road around in a self-driving car. Man, I’m kinda jealous, and I work here! 🙂 Makes me wonder what kind of campus tour I (or more likely my disembodied essence) might get in 50-odd years.
Wow—I’m really eager to see how this project develops:
The New York Times announced on Tuesday a virtual reality project in collaboration with Google, which will include the distribution of more than a million cardboard VR viewers to subscribers.
The New York Times Magazine will release a new virtual reality film, called “The Displaced,” about children uprooted by war. It can be watched with the cardboard viewers, which are used with a smartphone and will be sent to home delivery subscribers on the weekend of Nov. 7. Some digital subscribers will receive codes by email to redeem for a free viewer.
Google has invested nearly half a billion dollars in these guys, and though details remain scant, I love what we’ve seen so far.
“We can’t on video actually give you the experience you’ll have when you use our system,” Abovitz said of the teaser. […] “Effectively, you experience Gimbal [the robot] as a complete neurologic reality in the world with you—flying around, going behind things, [sitting] on top of tables,” Abovitz explained. “So he’s really there.”
Some Stanford brainiacs have taken expression-transfer technology to a new level, enabling one person to puppet the face of another, all in real time; see project site & blurb below.
We present a method for the real-time transfer of facial expressions from an actor in a source video to an actor in a target video, thus enabling the ad-hoc control of the facial expressions of the target actor. The novelty of our approach lies in the transfer and photo-realistic re-rendering of facial deformations and detail into the target video in a way that the newly-synthesized expressions are virtually indistinguishable from a real video.
Last month I mentioned Adobe’s paper on auto-removing distracting elements in photos. Now you can see researcher Eli Shechtman put the tech through its paces in this sneak peek:
So, it seems that Photoshop will soon enable what Illustrator offers now*—the ability to remix the app’s toolbar:
Cool, though no one will care—at least not yet.
Very few people will invest time in setting these up (as very few create & switch among workspaces or custom menu configurations), but maybe someday—just maybe—you’ll be able to sync not only your own app settings, but those of other users. That was always the vision for Configurator: One in a hundred (or a thousand) alpha nerds would create amazingly useful workspaces (e.g. the Khoi Vinh design configuration) that everyone else could grab simply by typing in a name like “@khoi” right into the app. That way an incredibly broad, general toolset could get crisply tailored for each community and task.
Power to the people. It’s a nice, and for now perpetual, dream.
Adobe’s Wil Li shows off “Audio Retargeting,” which (from what I gather) recuts a piece of music to make “tempo and rhythm match the scene and mood.” It’s much easier seen than described:
Margot & I liked the bejesus out of The Martian this past weekend, so I really enjoyed peeking behind the scenes with its editor, longtime Ridley Scott collaborator Pietro Scalia. I especially enjoyed hearing about his pre-digital work on JFK, characterized by its mashing-up of numerous footage types (“16mm, 1.85, Cinemascope, black and white, color, different forms of video, Super 8mm”). “Editing is writing with visuals,” he says. Check out ProVideo Coaltion for the full interview.
Sorry for the short notice, but if you’re around Mountain View tonight and, like me, are seeking ways to make more social impact with your life, come check out this event:
The Board Match offers a unique opportunity for Bay Area residents to become stronger leaders by serving on the boards of directors of local nonprofit organizations. Board service is for everyone, whether you’re just starting out, a mid-career professional, or a seasoned philanthropist, there is a nonprofit that will value your talents. Nonprofit board service offers young and mid-career professionals opportunities to become organizational and community leaders, with benefits for their own professional growth, as well as an entrée into philanthropy and civic stewardship that inspires others and can become a pattern for life. It offers seasoned professionals approaching retirement a vital next step in a lifelong career, the opportunity to put well-honed skills to use, build new networks, and foster the growth of other leaders.
Google Photos uses “deep learning” to help you find your images—but what does that entail, really? Spend five minutes with smart peeps & learn interesting things. (I find the erroneous barbell-arm thing pretty charming.)
The beautiful Paper ad I blogged on Sunday is just the latest installment in Honda’s rich creative history. It’s worth taking a look back at some terrific ads from the last decade—and these are just the ones I’ve blogged!
Googler Rita Masoud (who fled Afghanistan with her family) writes,
To double the impact of your contribution, we’ll match the first €5 million (~$5.5 million) in donations globally, until together we raise €10 million (~$11 million) for relief efforts.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
As I was doing some soul searching in July, I saw that Jessica Jackley, co-founder of microlending site Kiva.org, would be speaking at Google. I hurried to catch her talk and highly recommend it:
Kiva was born out of a desire to combine real human connections (vs. just transactions) with scalable, measurable impact. Earlier Jessica had been working at Stanford by day (where people talked in really ambitious but slightly impersonal terms about world-changing enterprises) and by night working with young mothers in East Palo Alto (where she made deep personal connections but questioned what change was resulting). Kiva is meant to foster real connections between entrepreneurs (many of whose stories she tells in the book) & lenders like you & me.
Sometimes you have to “dump the quarterback.” In high school she was asked out by Johnny Football Hero, and of course she had to say yes (as one does). But the guy was kind of a bore, and she dumped him (sacrilege!). It’s tough, but when the inside doesn’t match the outside (be it in a relationship, an ostensible dream job, etc.), something has to change.
I think you’ll find both the talk & the book rewarding, and if you’d like to get started lending via Kiva, check out my lender page and jump in!
Heh—folks worrying about the imminent & inevitable robopocalypse might want to check this out. Kottke writes,
[T]he system hadn’t seen much space imagery before, so it didn’t do such a great job. For the red ringed planet, it guessed “HAIR SLIDE, CHOCOLATE SAUCE, WAFFLE IRON” and the Enterprise was initially “COMBINATION LOCK, ODOMETER, MAGNETIC COMPASS” before it finally made a halfway decent guess with “SUBMARINE, AIRCRAFT CARRIER, OCEAN LINER”.
The scientists first gathered together thousands of photos and asked people (through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to manually mark distracting regions in them… That set of annotated images was then used to train a computer to recognize areas of photos people might want to remove in random photos presented to it.
Okay, but I’d like to see this run in reverse, slyly inserting weird little elements (garden gnome, rune, cursed tiki, etc.) into the periphery of your shots—not unlike the PhotoBomb Tool parody that I got in trouble for blogging at Adobe. :-p
Exciting work from USC & the Imperial College London. As Gizmodo writes,
The team of researcher has come up with a new way to capture the tiny details on the surface of various skin patches on an actor’s face at a resolution of 10 microns as they’re being stretched and deformed by a specially-designed rig. At that resolution the exact deformations of even individual skin pores is captured, and using custom software, the captured data can be mapped to the artificial skin of a CG character, making the emotions of the face so realistic you can’t tell human from computer human.
Google Photos wanted to see how fast New Yorkers could find their photos, and the results were delicious. Now we’re bringing the show on the road. Check us out in Los Angeles, where we’ll be dishing up free Coolhaus ice cream 8/21-8/22. New treats await in Portland (8/28 – 8/29) and Austin (9/4 – 9/5). Don’t forget to bring your phone!
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been seeking ways to live a more meaningful, impactful life. This doesn’t mean I have to run away to the desert to wear sackcloth & ashes—at least my family hopes not!—but it does mean pushing myself harder, and with more discipline, to ask good questions & to act on the answers.
Before I took my sabbatical to Guatemala, I reached out to Jeffrey Veen, who had just sold Typekit to Adobe. Over lunch he explained that after he’d left his previous gig, he undertook what he called “100 lunches,” meeting up with as many smart, interesting, creative people as he could. In the process he gradually formed the idea & knowledge needed to launch Typekit. In a similar vein, I’ve been talking to many of the bright, thoughtful people I’ve been blessed with meeting over the years, learning more about their journeys & perspectives.
My friend Deepa spent 10 years in product management at Macromedia/Adobe in SF, then totally reworked her life: she joined Charity Water, moved to NYC, learned a ton, and recently joined the Clinton presidential campaign. She advised me to think in lean-startup terms, prototyping changes to my life, seeing what holds promise, and iterating to learn more.
Deepa also mentioned The Quarter-Life Breakthrough. I don’t yet know much about the book, but I did enjoy the TED talk below from Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky, in which he talks about giving up what you’re supposed to value to pursue what brings you real satisfaction. A few key points:
Find believers. They’ll help hold you accountable.
Stop comparing. It’s the thief of joy. (Okay, he didn’t use those words, but Teddy Roosevelt did, so that’s something.)
Another day, another amazing demo from SIGGRAPH. Gizmodo reports,
A team from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies has built an automultiscopic 3D display which essentially makes a 3D model of the person with video. After capturing video of a person using 30 cameras in intensely bright light, the images are divided among the 216 projectors. The projectors are arranged in a semicircle around a large screen, so as viewers walk around the screen their eyes smoothly transition from one projection to the next. The result is feeling as if you can see crystal-clear depth and detail.
What if you could isolate & extract moving objects from video in nearly real time?
My Google colleague Yael Pritch worked with the Disney Research team that has now demoed how to remove noise & blur, increase resolution, make things disappear, and even clone moving objects. Check it out (and stick with it):
[Y]ou serve as an analytics expert for your partners, using numbers to help them make better decisions. You weave stories with meaningful insight from data. You make critical recommendations for your fellow Googlers in Engineering and Product Management. As a self-starter, you relish tallying up the numbers one minute and communicating your findings to a team leader the next.
The OctoMadness is a combination of 3D animation, 3D printing, sawing, painting and gluing every piece together… Designer and animator Klaas-Harm de Boer, wanted to create very flexible characters that show the power and freedom of animation. This zoetrope enables the audience to see each individual frame separately and gives a great insight into creating the final animation.
Camden Thrasher (name FTW!!) took a novel approach to capturing this year’s race. PetaPixel writes,
The 24 Hours of Le Mans is one of the racing world’s oldest, most famous, and most grueling races. Racing photographer Camden Thrasher covered the 2015 race last month and shot over 1,000 photos over the course of the day. Afterward, he took 1,158 of the photos he shot and turned them into this stop-motion video for Audi.
Some of the more stroboscopic results are a big GIFfy for my liking, but the slow-shutter sequences look terrific:
I come away feeling more dizzy & tripped out than like, “Hey, I’d like to buy a sensible small SUV!,” but Honda’s “Endless Road” spot still kinda works for me:
Harnessing the scanning technology of the Kinect, Semantic Paint creates a 3-D scan of the room you’re in, in real time. Initially, it sees the room as a single object, but users can begin labeling individual objects, just by coloring them in.
“After you watch this video,” writes The Verge, “Delta, the airline that just discovered the internet and resurrected its most beloved characters in the name of a dead-eyed laugh, will catapult you 30,000 feet into the air, and you won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
And will designers therefore finally stop making The Claw?
Not at the moment, according to Photoshop PM Stephen Nielson, but it’s quite old and is being superseded. Stephen writes,
The new Export As workflows are a complete redesign of how you export assets out of Photoshop. Export As has new capabilities like adding padding to an image and exporting shapes and paths to SVG. We also introduced the Quick Export option, which allows you to export an entire document or selected layers very quickly with no dialog.
Check out the post for a full (but brief) FAQ.
Semi-related: Developer Marc Edwards has for years been providing terrifically detailed Photoshop tips & tricks for screen/UI designers, and now he’s covered Photoshop CC 2015 improvements in concise detail.
It’s all kind of bananas, but it’s real, and it’s here (albeit in an unfinished form that I find kinda baffling) inside the new Photoshop CC update. Having pushed hard for years to make PS extensible (via Flash/HTML panels, Configurator) so that the UI could be smashed into a million pieces & then reassembled according to individuals’ tasks & needs, I’m really intrigued & eager to see where things go.
And with puppets! Give yourself a treat and spend the next six minutes watching David Friedman’s short film.
Ricky Syers is an off-beat 50 year old street performer who found his calling as a puppeteer after a lifetime of manual labor. While performing in New York City’s Washington Square Park, he met Doris Diether, an 86 year old community activist. They became friends and he made a marionette that looks just like her. Now she’s joined his act and the two of them can often be seen performing together.
Ricky Syers is an offbeat 50-year-old street performer who found his calling as a puppeteer after a lifetime of manual labor. While performing in New York City’s Washington Square Park, he met Doris Diether, an 86-year-old community activist. They became friends and he made a marionette that looks just like her. Now she’s joined his act and the two of them can often be seen performing together.
More neat stuff (some overlap from yesterday’s demo, yet worth a look on its own):
New features include Artboards that allow you to create multiple layouts in one Photoshop document, Device Preview which enables you to preview your Photoshop design in real time on an iOS device, new export options, the ability to add multiple instances of layer styles, and so much more. Don’t miss the new Linked Assets in Creative Cloud Libraries where when a change is made to an asset, you and your team members have the option of updating it across any Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign projects where it’s used.
My friend Emmanuel designed Drop, a little pool-monitoring device:
This solar-powered device will be your perfect pool assistant – simply throw it into your pool and drop will take care of the rest. The drop app will provide you with a custom maintenance plan specific to your pool size, type and needs. You will know if your pool water is safe for swimming and you will never have to guess how much treatment your pool needs.
On the graphics side, Apple is bringing its Metal framework to OS X, making graphics rendering 40 percent more efficient. For games, drawing performance can be ten times faster. Game developer Epic showed a Metal-based game it built, called Fortnite, and said its developers saw a 70-percent reduction in CPU use compared to OpenGL.
On the professional production side, Federighi said that Adobe was able to pull an eightfold improvement in After Effects rendering. Adobe is committed to adopting Metal across its OS X apps, he said.
My calligrapher friend Maria Brenny once told me of the delight she felt poking around the archives of Hallmark, where she discovered the archives of Mr. Hermann Zapf, designer of everything from Optima to Zapf Dingbats to Zapfino (used in our wedding invitations).
Zapf was among the pioneers of computerized typography, experimenting with computer-aided typesetting from the 1960s. He led a seminal design program at the Rochester Institute of Technology where collaborated with computer scientists and became acquainted with IBM and Xerox. Zapf invented a typesetting program called Hz-program, which later informed the design of the desktop publishing software Adobe InDesign.
In 1939, just as he was beginning his career as a graphic artist, Hermann Zapf was conscripted into the German army. He started working on a series of sketchbooks, small enough to keep in his uniform pocket at all times, and continued them throughout the war years. Although a handful of the pages have been reproduced previously, only a very few people have ever seen the contents of these three clothbound volumes in their entirety. Now, with the cooperation of the artist himself, the Hermann Zapf Sketchbook Facsimile Project will make the complete work available for the first time.
Bonus: My friends Matthew & Lori are big type nerds, and at age 3 their son Cooper was a big Zapfino fan. 🙂
Lastly, Hallmark produced this work with Zapf in the 1960s:
Only Google could think the world needs another photo app. Only Google could bring its unique combination of intelligence and arrogance to such a crowded market. And only Google could come along and actually beat Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Flickr, Microsoft, Amazon and countless others at their own game.
The verdict: Not only has Google proven there is more innovation left in photo apps, it seems it is also way ahead of its peers.
