Monthly Archives: June 2018

Photography: Kilauea puts on a show

Photography

Mick Kalber was willing to stick his neck out—literally—to offer a glimpse into Hawaii’s explosive landscape. I’m struck by the visual variety of the flows (seemingly crunchy, creamy, crusted, and more):

The Volcano Goddess Pele is continually erupting hot liquid rock into the channelized rivers leading to the Pacific Ocean. Most of the fountaining activity is still confined within the nearly 200-foot high spatter cone she has built around that eruptive vent. Her fiery fountains send 6-9 million cubic meters of lava downslope every day… a volume difficult to even wrap your mind around!

More flyovers are here.

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[Vimeo] [Via]

Adobe’s working to detect Photoshopping

Photography

Who better to sell radar detectors than the people who make radar guns?

From DeepFakes (changing faces in photos & videos) to Lyrebird (synthesizing voices) to video puppetry, a host of emerging tech threatens to further undermine trust in what’s recorded & transmitted. With that in mind, the US government’s DARPA has gotten involved:

DARPA’s MediFor program brings together world-class researchers to attempt to level the digital imagery playing field, which currently favors the manipulator, by developing technologies for the automated assessment of the integrity of an image or video and integrating these in an end-to-end media forensics platform.

With that in mind, I like seeing that Adobe’s jumping in to detect the work of its & others’ tools:

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[YouTube] [Via]

AR soccer on your table? Google & Facebook researchers make it happen

AR/VR

Can low-res YouTube footage be used to generate a 3D model of a ballgame—one that can then be visualized from different angles & mixed into the environment in front of you? Kinda, yeah!

Per TechCrunch,

The “Soccer On Your Tabletop” system takes as its input a video of a match and watches it carefully, tracking each player and their movements individually. The images of the players are then mapped onto 3D models “extracted from soccer video games,” and placed on a 3D representation of the field. Basically they cross FIFA 18 with real life and produce a sort of miniature hybrid.

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[YouTube]

Ohhhhhh yeaahhhh: ML produces super slow mo

Photography

Last year Google’s Aseem Agarwala & team showed off ways to synthesize super creamy slow-motion footage. Citing that work, a team at NVIDIA has managed to improve upon the quality, albeit taking more time to render results. Check it out:

[T]he team trained their system on over 11,000 videos of everyday and sports activities shot at 240 frames-per-second. Once trained, the convolutional neural network predicted the extra frames.

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[YouTube] [Via]

Demo: Synthesizing new views from your multi-lens phone images

Miscellaneous

You know the “I forced a bot to…” meme? Well, my colleagues Noah & team actually did it, forcing bots to watch real estate videos (which feature lots of stable, horizontal tracking shots) in order to synthesize animations between multiple independent images—say, the ones captured by a multi-lens phone:

We call this problem stereo magnification, and propose a learning framework that leverages a new layered representation that we call multiplane images (MPIs). Our method also uses a massive new data source for learning view extrapolation: online videos on YouTube.

Check out what it can enable:

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[YouTube]

VR180 Creator, a new video tool from Google

AR/VR

Sounds handy for storytellers embracing new perspectives:

VR180 Creator currently offers two features for VR videos. “Convert for Publishing” takes raw fisheye footage from VR180 cameras like the Lenovo Mirage Camera and converts it into a standardized equirect projection. This can be edited with the video editing software creators already use, like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. “Prepare for Publishing” re-injects the VR180 metadata after editing so that the footage is viewable on YouTube or Google Photos in 2D or VR.

You can learn more about how to use VR180 Creator here and you can download it here.

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[Via]

ZOMG, Lego Hasselblad!

Photography

Oh myyyyyy…

Per PetaPixel (which features a great gallery of images):

In all, the build took Sham about 2 hours and used 1,120 different pieces. Sham says she’s hoping to create a system in which you can create photos using the LEGO camera and a smartphone.

Sham has submitted her Hasselblad build to LEGO Ideas, LEGO’s crowdsourced system for suggesting future LEGO kits. LEGO has already selected Sham’s build as a “Staff Pick.” If Sham’s project attracts 10,000 supporters (it currently has around 500 at the time of this writing), then it will be submitted for LEGO Review, during which LEGO decision makers will hand-pick projects to become new official LEGO Ideas sets.

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[YouTube]

The AI will see you now—specifically, right through your wall

Miscellaneous

Fascinating:

The system works because those radio waves can penetrate objects like a wall, then bounce off a human body—which is mostly water, no friend to radio wave penetration—and travel back through the wall and to the device. “Now the challenge is: How do you interpret it?” Katabi says. That’s where the AI comes into play.

Now maybe we can get it running in your web browser, too. 🙂

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[YouTube]

“Bumping the Lamp”: AR storytelling insights from Roger Rabbit (for real!)

AR/VR, Illustration

If you’re interested in making augmented reality characters feel natural in the real world, it’s well worth spending a few minutes with this tour of some key insights. I’ve heard once-skeptical Google AR artists praising it, saying, “This video is a treasure trove and every artist, designer or anyone working on front-end AR should watch it.” Enjoy, and remember to bump that lamp. 🙂 

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[YouTube] [Via Jeremy Cowles]

WTF is with this dark pattern in iOS app trials?

Miscellaneous

Three of the free-to-download iOS apps I’ve tried in the last few days have led with a nasty trap for the less-than-vigilant: If you even want to try this app, agree up front to an expensive (like, orders of magnitude more than a usual app), ongoing subscription that quietly and perpetually renews until you figure out how to stop it.

This upends the normal trial relationship of “If & only if you like this offering enough to buy/subscribe, take action to do so; otherwise you’re off the hook.” Screw that: these apps are getting summarily shitcanned.

Meanwhile I’m amazed that Apple allows this practice to continue.

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Augmenting (?) Lego reality

AR/VR

Hmm—I’m intrigued by the filmmaking-for-kids possibilities here, but deeply ambivalent about introducing screen time into one of the great (and threatened) pure-imagination oases in my kids’ lives:

Up to four friends can play in the same set on four different iOS devices, and notably all of the virtual aspects of the LEGO AR app will be connected to physical LEGO sets. “We can save our entire world back into our physical set, and pick up where we left off later,” Sanders said.

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Flying cars (er, pontoon boats?) take a step forward

Design

Someday soon, I really want to come around a corner & see Larry Page (who evidently backs this company) tooling around over a nearby reservoir:

The Verge writes,

The Flyer weighs 250 pounds and sports 10 battery-powered propellors and two joysticks. It looks sort of like bobsled mounted on a couple of pontoons surrounded by a bunch of drone rotors — so, you know, totally safe I’m sure. Its not intended for soaring through the clouds like you’re George Jetson, with a maximum elevation is 10 feet and a top speed (limited by the flight control system) of 20 mph. Kitty Hawk has kept the pontoons for water landings, but gotten rid of the protective netting from the original prototype.

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[YouTube]

Moatboat: Voice-driven VR creation

AR/VR

Hmm—interesting, if embryonic: 

 

Use simple sentences to add objects and give them behaviors. Say ‘I need some sheep’ to add sheep into your world. Then give the sheep something to do by saying ‘Sheep eat grass’ or ‘Sheep breed’.

Everything you add becomes part of a working system. By layering multiple objects and behaviors, you can keep increasing the complexity of your creation.

Everything old is new again: Anyone remember The Subservient Chicken? You could ask it to perform more than 300 commands, many of which live on Wikipedia, because the internet is magic. Anyway, driving things via voice for its own sake is generally cool but stupid, but I know someone will do it well.

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[Vimeo] [Via Mike Rotondo]

Microsoft drops 800+ computers to the bottom of the ocean

Design

…and not just for Teh Lulz. This effort is actually quite fascinating:

The Verge writes,

Today’s underwater data center will be deployed for five years, and includes 12 racks with 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage. That’s enough storage for around 5 million movies, and the data center is as powerful as thousands of high-end desktop PCs. The data center will be powered by an undersea cable and renewable energy from the Orkney Islands. The cable will also connect the servers back to the internet.

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[YouTube]

Machine learning in trees: Cupertino students build a Smart Wildfire Sensor

Miscellaneous

Kids these days: Two high school students used TensorFlow, Google’s open-source machine learning tool, to build a Smart Wildfire Sensor, 

Aditya Shah and Sanjana Shah, two friends and high school students from Cupertino, California… built a Smart Wildfire Sensor, which can help predict where wildfires are most likely to occur in a given area so firefighters are better prepared to stop them.

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[YouTube]

Demo: Apple “Memoji”

AR/VR, Illustration

Hmm—I foresee having fun creating & donning our son’s infamous “Henry Face” and using it as a puppet. The combo of 2D stickers + 3D faces (jump to 5:52) makes me wonder whether we might see Bitmoji, which already exist in a limited 3D form, gain the ability to pair 3D face avatars with 2D preset reaction artwork (sort of the age-old “put your face through a hole in a painted board” tourist photo idea come to more life).

https://youtu.be/dTg14KM6kiA?t=3m7s

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[YouTube]

“Monet Was Here”: Travel Earth through the painter’s eyes

AR/VR, Illustration

“Oh God, not another haystack,” I found myself pleading as my folks dragged my young self through Chicago’s crowded Art Institute in the 80’s. Happily Google’s new Monet Was Here offers a much less jostling way to visit the places that inspired Monet throughout his life, from the coast to the city to the countryside, explore his paintings by color palette, and more. Enjoy!

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World’s Largest LEGO Cherry Blossom Tree

Design

7,000 lbs? 881,000 pieces? 6,500 hours of construction time? I am there for this.

A record-breaking LEGO tree has taken shape at LEGOLAND Japan, a theme park in Nagoya dedicated to the beloved plastic bricks. The cherry tree’s construction marks the theme park’s first anniversary, and has been registered as the “largest LEGO brick cherry blossom tree” in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was made with 881,470 bricks which took over 6,500 hours to assemble.

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[YouTube] [Via]

Drawn together: Sketch in AR on iOS + Android via “Just A Line”

AR/VR, Illustration

Google’s newly announced Cloud Anchors help users place virtual content in the same real world location that can be seen on different devices. You can grab the simple, fun, open-source Just A Line app for iOS and Android to take it for a spin with a friend, or just to sketch in space solo:

Just put two phones side-by-side and tap the partner icon. Once the phones are connected, you and your partner will be able to see, and contribute to, the same drawing.

This makes Just a Line the first app that lets two people create together in AR, at the same time, across Android and iOS.

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[YouTube] [Via]