This is one of the many Google projects to which I’ve been lucky enough to contribute just a bit (focusing on object tracking & graphical adornments). It’s built into Google Photos, among other surfaces, and I’m really pleased that people are seeking it out:
I love seeing people with the means—material, technical, organizational—to help fight the pandemic stepping up to do so. As one step:
To help with vaccination efforts, starting in the United States, we’ll make select Google facilities—such as buildings, parking lots and open spaces—available as needed. These sites will be open to anyone eligible for the vaccine based on state and local guidelines. We’ll start by partnering with health care provider One Medical and public health authorities to open sites in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in California; Kirkland, Washington; and New York City, with plans to expand nationally. We’re working with local officials to determine when sites can open based on local vaccine availability.
Google is also adding $150 million to previous commitments around education & access:
Our efforts will focus heavily on equitable access to vaccines. Early data in the U.S. shows that disproportionately affected populations, especially people of color and those in rural communities, aren’t getting access to the vaccine at the same rates as other groups. To help, Google.org has committed $5 million in grants to organizations addressing racial and geographic disparities in COVID-19 vaccinations, including Morehouse School of Medicine’s Satcher Health Leadership Institute and the CDC Foundation.
“A witness, someone who sees what others simply watch,” the company writes in a description of the campaign. “When Leica invented the first 35mm camera in 1914, it allowed people to capture their world and the world around them and document its events, no matter how small or big they were. Today, as for more than one century, Leica keeps celebrating the witnesses, the ones who see the everyday beauty, grace and poetry, and the never ending irony and drama of our human condition, and bring their cameras to the eye in order to frame it and fix it forever.
I love seeing progress towards making the world more accessible, and tech that’s good for inclusion can also benefit all users & businesses. Here the researchers write,
To make our models work better for everyone, we fine-tuned them so that data was sampled from images across all geographies, and using translations of hashtags in many languages. We also evaluated our concepts along gender, skin tone, and age axes. The resulting models are both more accurate and culturally and demographically inclusive — for instance, they can identify weddings around the world based (in part) on traditional apparel instead of labeling only photos featuring white wedding dresses.
Facebook says that this new model is more reliably able to recognize more than 1,200 concepts, which is more than 10 times as many as the original version launched in 2016.
Our kids were born with such voluminous, Dizzy Gillespie-grade cheeks that we immediately dubbed them “The Squirrels,” and we later gave our van the license plate SQRLPOD. This has nothing to do with anything, but I thought of it fondly upon seeing this charming 1-minute portrait:
Niki Colemont, is a wildlife photographer and a survivor who fled the Rwandan genocide at just four years old, arriving in Belgium as a refugee. The National Geographic 2019 finalist photographer finds peace today in photographing squirrels, who he considers “the perfect models.”
Imagine loading multi-gigabyte 3D models nearly instantaneously into your mobile device, then placing them into your driveway and stepping inside. That’s what we’ve now enabled via Google Search on Android:
Take it for a spin via the models listed below, and please let us know what you think!
“For he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children…”
Photographer Ty Poland tells the story, including this MacGyver-y bit:
Next up, we needed a lasso. Thankfully our good friend Martin Sanchez had an extra pair of shoes in the trunk. On top of that, he had just polished off a fresh iced coffee from Dunkin with a straw. With these two ingredients, we were able to construct an open lasso. By simply putting the straw over the shoelace and adding a small key chain for weight, we were able to center the lasso to the Mavic 2 Pro for the rescue.
On a day of new hope & new vision, I’m delighted to see Google, Huawei, and the medical community using ML to help spot visual disorders in kids around the world:
This machine learning framework performs classification and regression tasks for early identification of patterns, revealing different types of visual deficiencies in children. This AI-powered solution reduces diagnosis time from months to just days, and trials are available across 5 countries (China, UAE, Spain, Vietnam and Mexico).
If you want to be successful, says Twitter founder Evan Williams, “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
My old Photoshop boss Kevin Connor liked to cite the Healing Brush as an example of how tech kept evolving to offer more specialized, efficient solutions (in this case, from the more general Clone Stamp to something purpose-built). Content-Aware Fill, which we shipped back in 2010, was another such optimization, and now its use is getting even more specialized/direct.
Samsung added Object Eraser, a tool powered by AI that appears to work by combining object recognition with something like Adobe’s Content-Aware Fill. In any photo captured on an S21 series phone, simply tap the button to tell activate Object Eraser, then just tap on the people you want to remove, and then the phone automatically does all the work.
I was excited to learn today that Adobe’s Russell Brown, together with a large group of other experts, is set to teach night photography techniques February 12-14:
28 speakers in 6 categories will present 30+ talks over three days. Our goal: “Inspiring night photographers across the galaxy.”
Check out the schedule & site for more. Meanwhile I’m hoping to get out to the desert with Russell in a couple of weeks, and I hope to help produce some really cool stuff. 🤞
We sure love our Westy and even find ourselves working in her in the driveway (e.g. when the cleaning folks are in the house), but this Nissan office-van concept looks pretty swanky. Roof deck FTW!
Awesome Dad-flex: Telling your tiny, Cars-loving kids that you know Guido the forklift. 😌
Granted, it was a little confusing to explain that I knew the voice of the cartoon forklift & that he was actually a brainy Italian guy who worked at Pixar—but it worked. In any case, now Guido Quaroni—who spent 20 years at Pixar & who was always a fantastic host during Adobe customer visits—has now joined the Big Red A:
“I’ve been a customer of Adobe’s software for a number of years, and I always admired Adobe’s commitment to provide top of the line tools to creatives,” said Quaroni. “When I heard about Adobe’s renewed interest in entering into the 3D market, given how much more pervasive the consumption of 3D content is becoming, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I’m excited to be joining the Adobe team to help accelerate and grow their 3D offerings for creatives worldwide.”
I remain proud to have delivered, at Guido’s urging, perhaps the most arcane feature request ever: he asked for per-layer timestamps in Photoshop so that Pixar’s rendering pipeline could discern which layers had actually been changed by artists, thereby saving a lot of rendering time. We got this done, and somehow it gives me roughly as much pleasure as having delivered a photo editor that’s used by hundreds of millions of people every month. 😌
Anyway, here’s to great things for Guido, Adobe, and 3D creators everywhere!
I’m a longtime admirer of Reuben Wu’s beautiful light painting work, and planning to head to Death Valley next month, I thought I’d try to learn more about his techniques. Happily he’s shared a quick, enlightening (heh) peek behind the scenes of his process:
I also enjoyed this more detailed how-to piece from Daniel James. He’s convinced me to spring for the Lume Cube Mavic Pro kit, though I welcome any additional input!
As part of Fiat Chrysler’s Virtual Showroom CES event, you can experience the new innovative 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with your phone. You can then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of you—conveniently in your own driveway or in any open space. Check out what the car looks like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior with incredible details.
A bit on how it works:
The Cloud AR tech uses a combination of edge computing and AR technology to offload the computing power needed to display large 3D files, rendered by Unreal Engine, and stream them down to AR-enabled devices using Google’s Scene Viewer. Using powerful rendering servers with gaming-console-grade GPUs, memory, and processors located geographically near the user, we’re able to deliver a powerful but low friction, low latency experience.
This rendering hardware allows us to load models with tens of millions of triangles and textures up to 4k, allowing the content we serve to be orders of magnitude larger than what’s served on mobile devices (i.e., on-device rendered assets).
And to try it out:
Scan the QR code below, or check out the FCA CES website. Depending on your OS, device, and network strength, you will see either a photorealistic, cloud-streamed AR model or an on-device 3D car model, both of which can then be placed in your physical environment.
I’m excited to see my Adobe friends continuing to make on-the-go sketching & illustrating richer & more delightful. Check out a brief demo of some of the latest:
With so much chaos here on earth, I love seeing people from all walks of life come together to delight in beholding the beauty of our moon. Please treat yourself to at least these two beautiful minutes.
Sheeeeeeit… Netflix has gotten Isiah Whitlock. Jr. together with Nicolas Cage, Sarah Silverman, and numerous other interesting, funny folks to dive into the etymology & cultural histories of forbidden language. I haven’t yet seen it, but it looks fun:
Grainy & surreal, this film demanded “elaborate but pointless effort” (in the words of creator Soetkin Verstegen) to animate puppets encased in transient ice. I found it mesmerizing.
Given our family’s love of irony & wordplay, my wife Margot had the inspired idea of commissioning a portrait of our dog (a.k.a. “doge,” per the meme) as a Venetian doge. George at FavoritePaws did an amazing job, our son Finn’s mind was fully blown, and now the noble Seamus hangs in honor as the real pup slumbers below. 😌
