Everyone, a friend once said, is always asking the same thing over & over based on who they are. The words change, but the underlying question for each tends to be the same:

• Project managers are always asking, “Are you efficient? Are you effective?”
• Artists & product managers are asking, “Do you get it?” (What game are we playing, and how do we keep score?)
• Engineers are always asking, “Are you a moron?” (Did you consider this, think of that, etc.?)

I thought of this on Monday as Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron spoke at Google. Instead of evaluating the what of things (what did you accomplish, create, earn, etc.), she emphasized weighing the why. What is your intention? Is, for example, a charitable contribution really driven by love of others, or is it meant to stroke your ego?

I can’t claim any deep insight here, but I was struck by the parallel & by the wisdom—in life & in work, especially PM work—of pursuing the Five Whys. Hmm; more thinking to be done.

What a meaningful use of technology. The Mine Kafon Drone claims to be “up to 20 times faster than traditional demining technologies,” and “As well as being safer, it also up to 200 times cheaper.” Check it out:

https://youtu.be/qNyv8Ytq9vs

Been wanting to hand-scribble a foil & duel with Mark Zuckerberg? Well, my friend, your long wait is over. 🙂 Here’s an interesting demo from Oculus Connect:

[YouTube] [Via Ben Grossmann]

What witchcraft is this…?

Embedded into both the base and the Cloud are magnetic components that allow the cloud to float 1-2 inches off the base. While the base itself must remain plugged in a rechargeable lithium ion battery powers the Cloud and enables a totally wireless and unobstructed levitation.

Is it for real? The Verge writes,

While the Smart Cloud is an actual product that you can purchase (for a whopping $3,360), no release information has yet been announced for Making Weather, although it likely will fall in a similarly expensive range.

[Vimeo]

Exciting work from Speakable:

Action Button, which is a snippet of code that lives on publishers’ article pages and gives their readers the option to take direct action. Speakable’s technology is able to understand the content and sentiment of an article and match it with the proper non-profit partner.

From there, users can click the Action Button to send an email to a legislator or tweet to a decision-maker or even make a donation.

[Vimeo]

What happens if you take what was already a noir homage & “turn the noir factor up to 11”? Here, take a look:

[YouTube] [Via]

Heh—I’m a sucker for pop-culture mash-ups, and the Micronaxx are huge fans of both American Ninja Warrior & Lego, so I really enjoyed these well-executed pieces (featuring actual ninjas!):

[YouTube]

Hmm—let’s see what develops here. PetaPixel explains,

First, it can manipulate an image based on very basic coloring, sketching, or warping commands. So you can change the shape, color, and size of an object in just a brush stroke or two, with the final product maintaining as natural a look as possible.

Second, it can actually generate images based on a rudimentary sketch.

Check out more info & demos from Berkeley.

PetaPixel also points out a “neural photo editor” from researchers at the University of Edinburgh:

[I]t uses machine learning to predict and apply the changes you’re intending to make. For example, if you select a bright color and start painting over someone’s hair, it will assume you want to turn them blonde; being using longer brush strokes, and that blonde hair grows longer.

You simply select a color using their “contextual paintbrush” and have at it. The most basic inputs can produce extreme changes.

I love seeing great new student work:

The Adobe Design Achievement Awards is a global digital media competition for student creators. Connected to industry professionals, academic leaders, and top brands, the ADAA aims to launch the next generation of student careers.

[Via Matthew Richmond][Via]

Man, as if I didn’t already wish I had one of these things on our current vacation… Check out Michael Shainblum’s quick demo of the ultra-portable new DJI drone’s footage. (Spoiler: It’s not blurry.)

[Via]

Attempting to stay un-murdered by my family during our current trip, I’m taking it easy on blogging this week. In the meantime, here are a few quick links to articles I think you’d find worthwhile:

• Benedict Evans: Imaging, Snapchat, and Mobile
• Om Malik: With the iPhone 7, Apple changed the camera industry forever
• PetaPixel: Qualcomm Clear Sight will put dual cameras on a lot of smartphones: “It works exactly like Huawei’s P9 camera system—and not like the iPhone 7 Plus’s—in that one sensor is color and the other is black and white. So while the iPhone focuses on giving you more zoom power with the second camera, the second sensor in the Qualcomm module is all about capturing more detail and better low light shots.”
• Austin Mann reviews an iPhone 7 via a trip to Rwanda

#TheMoreYouKnow 🙂

[YouTube]

“Punk rock Palm Pilot” isn’t a phrase one hears much—in fact, Google search has never heard it—but maybe it’ll apply to Snapchat’s new $130 Spectacles, due to arrive soon. First, here’s how they work: 

What do you think?

As someone with no dog in this fight (i.e. these really are my thoughts, not Google’s), a few observations:

• If Google Glass was the Apple Newton of the wearable capture space (complex, ambitious, unsure of its key purpose), what will be the Palm Pilot (simpler, cheaper, laser-focused)? But this being Snapchat, they’ll bring a healthy does of punk ethos/social lubricant. “Or not, whatevs!”
• They’re keeping initial expectations low. “Spiegel refers to it as a toy, to be worn for kicks at a barbecue or an outdoor concert” (WSJ).
• They’re trying to reduce creepiness by providing social cues. “Lights show friends you’re Snapping” is important, but so is the fact that these are sunglasses—better suited to outdoor, public shooting than, say, creeping around in bars. (Side bonus: This helps manage low-light expectations for the small, inexpensive camera.)
• It’s not (yet) for broadcast. “Wirelessly add your Snaps to Memories on Snapchat.” Note that it doesn’t transfer them directly to your shared Story. This almost certainly stems from the lack of  People don’t share because they fear embarrassment—oversharing, looking foolish, revealing too much. Largely forgotten apps like Instagram Bolt & Taptalk “improved” upon Snapchat by making it possible to launch, capture, and share in two taps—but that gain in speed (saving one tap) wasn’t worth the loss of control.
• Apparently it generates a new “circular video” format (demo) that is always cropped when displayed on phones, requiring you to rotate them to see everything. Hmm—color me skeptical about that. People keep phones in portrait orientation something like 92% of the time, and Snapchat’s vibe has been all about embracing laziness & apathy, not making people invest effort. But I’ll happily reserve judgement until I can try it out.
• “Snapchat is the only company cool enough to possibly dismantle the Google Glass stigma,” writes Josh Constine at TechCrunch. He also anticipates them doing a constrained rollout, getting celebs to make the device cool/exclusive first. (Stay tuned for the louvered Kanye A-Hole Edition, bringing this tweet to fruition.)

[YouTube]

Many vehicles were harmed in the making of this movie. Although I’d have traded roughly half of these for some semblance of plot or character development (yes yes, you & the rest of the world violently disagree), it’s pretty damn impressive to see real atoms blow up real good: 

[YouTube]

Get some: 

We are pleased to share a sample of the visual effects work created for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The history of ILM leads all the way back to 1975 and origins of Star Wars and The Force Awakens gave us the opportunity to once again push the boundaries of what is possible in character animation and visual effects while combining cutting edge practical effects and physical sets. ILM studios in San Francisco, Singapore, Vancouver and London each contributed to the film effects as did our partners Hybride, Base FX and Virtuos.

[YouTube]

I loved the bejesus out of “Kubo & the Two Strings”—easily the most interesting new movie I’ve seen this year, even if it was a touch edgy for my 8-year-old & would’ve been way too intense for my big-hearted 7-year-old. Now Filmmaker Vugar Efendi has posted a lovely 3-minute overview showing how the art form has evolved over 100+ years. The Verge writes,

Starting with 1900’s The Enchanted Drawing and running all the way up through 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings,short video is a fascinating look at how the technique has evolved over the years, and include some of cinema’s best-known moments, from King Kong atop the Empire State Building to the AT-AT attack in The Empire Strikes Back.

Enjoy:

Odd & kinda brilliant:

And if that puts you in the mood for vehicular mayhem, check out real-life madness on the Isle of Man.

[YouTube]

(Cue Goat Boy braying, “Hey, remember the niiiiineties?”)

This entertaining short piece covers not just “@ Cafe,” an East Village internet cafe that launched in 1995, but also touches on the history of St. Mark’s Place, gun-toting Germans, “Mr. Zero,” T1 lines, CUSeeMe, clueless Bryant Gumbel, and more. Enjoy!

[YouTube] [Via Lauren Friedman]

Movies, Android apps, magazines & more are ferried past government censors & past the lack of connectivity via “El Paquete Semanal” (the weekly packet), a 1TB flash drive that functions as the island’s backdoor content distribution network. Check out this short, enlightening documentary from Vox, and see John Graham-Cumming’s article for more details.

[YouTube]

“What Google’s Tilt Brush is to Adobe Illustrator, SoundStage is to GarageBand,” writes the Verge. “It’s a VR music application that lets you arrange synthesizers, drums, speakers, and other equipment within the boundaries of your room, so you have a custom-built studio to make your own tunes.” Check it out:

[YouTube]

A little story of perseverance & defiance from my past…

So, when I got out of school with a History degree, I wasn’t exactly highly employable, so I used my self-taught design & coding skills to talk myself into an internship in NY. Most people at the agency were cool, but the admins were kind of petty tyrants who liked to deny things to the interns just to keep us in our (unpaid) places. That included denying us phones and nametags for our desks.

Not digging the indignity, one weekend I came into the office, stuck a full-time colleague’s nametag into a scanner, then brought it into Illustrator & generated a template from which I could bang out my own versions. I proceeded to create a ton of absurd variations—e.g. “Unmoved Mover,” “HMFIC,” etc.—that I then cycled through displaying. One variation said “Johnny Folk Hero,” and I ended up leaving it up for a while.

Later, a woman came back from a meeting laughing: “Someone was in there asking whether a graphics intern could do a project. ‘Isn’t there a Johnny something?’ she asked. ‘Oh, John Nack?’ ‘No, it’s like… something Native American, I think—Johnny Folk Hero or something??’”

This, as you might imagine, kind of made my life. 🙂

Illegitimi non carborundum,
J.

“Using traditional cameras and algorithms,” MIT News reports, “[Interactive Dynamic Video] looks at the tiny, almost invisible vibrations of an object to create video simulations that users can virtually interact with.” Check it out:

“This technique lets us capture the physical behavior of objects, which gives us a way to play with them in virtual space,” says CSAIL PhD student Abe Davis, who will be publishing the work this month for his final dissertation. “By making videos interactive, we can predict how objects will respond to unknown forces and explore new ways to engage with videos.”

[YouTube]

I can’t promise it’ll make golf exciting, and the mental image of my dad & uncles jumping up from their recliners to fly around an AR golf course makes me chuckle. Having said that, this demo of Microsoft’s HoloLens suggests some interesting possibilities for the future.

[YouTube]

The popular $19 add-on from developer Anastasiy Safari has gained a range of new capabilities:

I added Vector Shape color control, new color spaces like HSL, YCbCr, YUV, XYZ display on the color wheel. And also MagicPicker now displays the name of color, which is a real help for web designers and color blind artists! Full Retina/4K/5K+ screens scaling. And Interactive Help now makes it easier to learn all MagicPicker’s functionality. Still supports all Photoshops from CS3 up to newest CC2015.5.

Florid, overwrought, slightly bananas? Sure—but so is the genre it emulates, and dang if I didn’t learn some interesting things about the mission:

[YouTube] [Via]

I awoke from a Bailey’s-tinged snooze a few months ago to behold Stephen Colbert interacting in realtime with a lurid, loudmouthed cartoon Donald Trump. Quickly I shot a note to my friends working on Adobe Character Animator: “Hey, have you guys seen this thing? I wonder what app they’re using.” “Uhh… {something something, we can neither confirm nor deny…}” they wrote back.

I’m delighted that the team can now take credit for powering this silliness—along with the recent live-animated Simpsons episode. Check out the Trump puppet in action:



They’ve also recently announced lots of improvements to the app. Here’s a taste:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

You can start to see why Google has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into these guys:

Per TechCrunch,

ILM & Magic Leap “are building a joint research lab, the “Collab Lab,” at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco campus…

“[B]efore magical realism becomes a seamless part of everyday life, it needs some advanced prototyping. Our ‘Collab Lab’ is a focal point of practical problem solving, concrete groundwork, sweat and hyper innovation.”

[YouTube]

Brutal & hilarious. :-p (Pairs well with that This American Life episode about teens & Instagram.)

[YouTube]

Head to photos.google.com/albums, click an image within an album, and choose “Slideshow” from the overflow menu (upper right corner). The team writes,

You like crowding friends and family around your computer or TV to show them photos of last weekend’s adventure. You don’t like clicking 132 times to show them each photo.

Luckily for you, it’s now possible to play a slideshow from any album. Just open the album, click on a photo, and select Slideshow from the dropdown menu.

For the ultimate viewing experience, cast the Chrome tab to your TV while you sit back, relax, and make everyone jealous with your amazing photos.

Slideshows are supported in Photos on Android as well.

Imagine watching a live ballgame while being able to fly around the field or court in VR, viewing the action from any angle.

That’s the sort of future that could be enabled by new research from Microsoft. A team there has devised a way to capture live performances, generate 3D models, and stream the results. Check it out:

The team writes,

We present the first fully automated end-to-end solution to create high-quality free-viewpoint video encoded as a compact data stream. Our system records performances using a dense set of RGB and IR video cameras, generates dynamic textured surfaces, and compresses these to a streamable 3D video format. Four technical advances contribute to high fidelity and robustness: multimodal multi-view stereo fusing RGB, IR, and silhouette information; adaptive meshing guided by automatic detection of perceptually salient areas; mesh tracking to create temporally coherent subsequences; and encoding of tracked textured meshes as an MPEG video stream. Quantitative experiments demonstrate geometric accuracy, texture fidelity, and encoding efficiency. We release several datasets with calibrated inputs and processed results to foster future research.

[YouTube] [Via Ben Grossman]

Check out a great demo from my pal Julieanne:

Now you can quickly correct perspective in a photograph with precision and control using the new Transform Panel, Guided Upright tool, and Offset sliders. Watch as Julieanne demonstrates how to manually position guides to automatically correct converging vertical and horizontal lines in images, which can then be repositioned within the canvas area.

The features are available now, and you can find a bit more info via the Lightroom Journal [YouTube]

Remember how I asked recently how soon we’d see real-life AR makeup? Yeah, didn’t take long:

There’s “working at Google” and then there’s (cue booming, serious voice) “working at Google.” I’m certainly doing the former, dramatically less impressive sort; these brainiacs are evidently next door at Moffett Field doing the latter*. Maybe after a few (dozen) more watchings I’ll start to grok more about Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab—but in the meantime, it remains an interesting bit of storytelling:

*This morning I heard James Corden describe sitting next to Chris Hemsworth and thinking, “Okay, technically we’re from the same species, but come on…” :-p

[YouTube]

Intel has acquired some very impressive 3D technology tailored to sports broadcasting:

Replay’s freeD technology created a 3D video rendering of the entire court using 28 ultra-HD cameras placed around the area. Those cameras were connected to Intel servers, which then allowed broadcasters to transmit the contest from various angles and give fans a 360-degree view of the dunks.

I wonder to what extent this’ll take off. A lot of sports fans I know are lazy bastards who won’t want this sort of active involvement in the content. I always think of the Onion’s goof on Doritos—”‘cuz you’re too biz-zay for chewin’!”

Now, I can imagine a couple of very compelling sports-related experiences:

• You don goggles & see a huge phalanx of big screens, each presenting a different game (think: a shitty efficiency apartment suddenly puts Dave & Buster’s to shame*), and you’re able to flit among them while getting a steady stream of news, hot chicks (because why not?), and all the ads.
• One or more of these broadcasts augments its regular, curated 2D presentation with a bunch of 360º feeds shot from the sidelines, overhead, etc.
• Your coked-up magpie brain now flits among these at warp speed, perceiving only degrees of boredom.

So, good times, then. 🙂

J.

*Note: Dave & Buster’s, like Donald Trump, exists on a plane beyond shame, but that’s another matter.

[YouTube]

The pop-up Himeji Castle? Utterly bonkers. 

[C]reated by YouTuber and Japanese LEGO enthusiast talapz, the build took 15 months to finish, and is 70cm square (27.6in) by 11.5cm (4.5in) tall. It uses no glue.

I salute it with one push of this big red button.

[YouTube]

At I/O last week Google hosted a bunch of kids to learn about new technologies & test-drive some forthcoming apps:

The team also announced a cool partnership with MIT:

Google is teaming up with MIT’s Media Lab to create Scratch Blocks, an updated version of the kid-centric programming language. Available now as a developer preview, student participants at Google’s I/O Youth event were able to get an early look at the new tools…

Scratch is a visual programming language developed by MIT’s Media Lab back in 2007  to make it easier for kids to learn the foundational knowledge required for programming and other technical skills… The update also makes it easier to bring Scratch to smaller screens like smartphones and tablets.

The team notes,

This prototype implementation of Scratch Blocks controls a LEGO WeDo 2.0 device over a bluetooth connection. 

[Via Andy Russell]

Terrific collaborative work from Animators Collective:

 [YouTube] [Via]

Clearly my neighbors are having way too much fun exploring the future of VR by rapidly creating tons of little apps:

PM Andrey Doronichev writes,

We were initially skeptical that drumsticks could be more efficient than direct hand interaction, but the result surprised us. Not only was typing with drumsticks faster than with a laser pointer, it was really fun! We even built a game that lets you track your words per minute (mine was 50 wpm!)

Now I just have to brave the egret stench to walk over and tell them to keep down the drumming noise already!

[YouTube]

Heh—Lixi Studios touches a hilarious nerve with their ode (?) to the love-hate struggles of editing video.

[YouTube] [Via]

Designer & maker Wataru Kami has devised BrushKnob, an ultra simple tool for controlling brush size in Photoshop. Having seen a lot of external controllers come & go over the last 10+ years (Logitech NuLooq anyone… anyone? Adobe Nav app? VSCO Keys?), I know it’s a very steep hill to climb—but good for Wataru for trying.

[Vimeo] [Via Paul Chavez]

Kurt Rauffer imagines The Empire Strikes Back getting modern Bond-style titles:

The style and tone of the animation was inspired by the James Bond title sequences. The music was a rejected song from the newest Bond film, Spectre, sung by Radiohead. I really wanted to play on the concept of Luke trying to find himself and true purpose, so the music and inspiration felt fitting.

[Vimeo] [Via]

“Your number one task as a speaker,” says TED impresario Chris Anderson*, “is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift — a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.” Among his key points in this great eight-minute talk:

• One, limit your talk to just one major idea.
• Two, give your listeners a reason to care.
• Three, build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands.
• Four, here’s the final tip: Make your idea worth sharing. 

*See also this really interesting profile of him. [Via Lin Sebastian Kaiser]

I love focused, purposeful little tools like this:

[YouTube] [Via Stu Maschwitz]

I just found out about this event & wish I could attend (darn “actual job” getting in the way again), but if you’re free at 4pm in San Francisco, you should definitely cruise over to 601 Townsend St. to see one of the true OG’s of computer imaging speak. Ed Catmull is president of Pixar & Disney Animation Studios, and if you do anything with graphics today, you’ll likely use techniques he invented. The talk won’t be broadcast, so get there a bit early so that you can check in with security & meet other interesting peeps.

Cool progress:

Cloud Vision API graduates to General Availability

The goal of Cloud Vision API is to provide vision capability to your applications in the same way that Google Photos does. It is a powerful tool for media and entertainment companies enabling you to classify images and analyze emotional facial attributes. To further improve our customer experience, Cloud Vision API is going into general availability today with new features:

• Logo Detection expanded to cover millions of logos
• Updated OCR for understanding more granular text like receipts

Who needs Ms. Frizzle when you’ve got the military-industrial complex in your corner? Check out what Lockheed Martin’s been up to:

Passengers aboard the Mars Experience bus are treated to an immersive virtual reality adventure. As the bus moves, it makes the students feel like they’re driving across the red planet by showing 200 square miles of its surface on the boarded-up windows… Lockheed Martin’s high-tech vehicle will tour the US to give students from different regions a chance to try it out.

https://youtu.be/X5JTb_7qv78

Lockheed Martin has launched Generation Beyond, a first of its kind, national educational program to bring the science of space into thousands of homes and classrooms across America. The Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program is designed to inspire the next generation of innovators, explorers, inventors and pioneers to pursue STEM careers.

[YouTube]

I don’t know karate, but I know ka-reepy… 

Looks super cool, though the idea of modifying lip syncing makes me envision a car cresting a hill into a desert in which a giant billboard reads “WELCOME TO THE UNCANNY VALLEY.”

Quartz notes,

The project is a collaboration between computer scientists at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. The same team produced a similar study last year, but that iteration required data from special 3D cameras. Their new system works with any camera and any recorded video.

I’m also tempted to run the lip sync enhancer in reverse, causing a disconnect between actors & the words they spoke. I’d then dub-aware fill the resulting gaps with awkward coughing & grunting, a la classic chopsocky.

In a related vein, see previous: Apple now owns this facial animation technology.

[YouTube] [Via Kevin McMahon]

The content analysis tech in Google Photos is pretty rad, but it’s not limited to Photos (you can use it, too!) or to Google. Lately I keep seeing interesting work from across the industry:

• Facebook begins using artificial intelligence to describe photos to blind users
• Microsoft’s Spooky New Bot Can Automatically Caption Your Photos – Sometimes
• Face Recognition With Python, in Under 25 Lines of Code [Via Paul Chavez]

“Collectively, Nik’s intellectual sophistication is that of a chess grand master,” wrote Om Malik (whom I finally met last night) recently wrote in the New Yorker. Ah, but we live in a world of McDonald’s, as Steve Jobs points out in the clip below—one of my all-time favorites. He so clearly believed in raising the world’s collective taste level, of educating our palettes & helping appreciate better work. May we all reflect and ask, What culture am I bringing to my work?

[YouTube]