If this isn’t the darkest timeline, it’s sure vying to be the weirdest…

The sound of 10,000 digital ghosts, screaming their torment while an unseen puppetmaster yanks carelessly on their strings. That’s America, baby!

😬 Play ball!

“Your scientists were so preoccupied…” that, well, you know.

PetaPixel writes,

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method capable of rendering photo-realistic and temporally coherent results at megapixel resolution,” the team of researchers at Disney Research Studios and ETH Zurich write in their new paper, titled “High-Resolution Neural Face Swapping for Visual Effects.”

The new method developed aims to “disentangle” the “static identity information” of a person’s face from the “dynamic behavioral information,” allowing any performance to be transferable between any two people.

My team has been collaborating with Maps folks for the last year+ to power great AR experiences, and while the feature below isn’t AR per se, it leverages the same tech stack to address a longstanding problem with GPS. Per 9to5 Google,

Google is now letting you “Calibrate with Live View” to improve the accuracy of the blue dot in Maps. Most are familiar with the dot that marks current location having a beam to signify what direction you’re pointed in. […]

Tapping the blue circle will open a full-screen menu with the new option at the bottom under “Save your parking.” This will launch the same camera UI used by Live View and should only take a few seconds of panning.

Afterwards, your location should be highly accurate and not jump around. Meanwhile, the beam is replaced by a solid arrow.

Check out some fun new work from my team, available now on both Android & iOS:

Google started adding augmented reality animals to searches last year at Google I/O and has since introduced a veritable menagerie, covering cats, scorpions, bears, tigers, and many more. Now, a herd of dinosaurs has also been added to this list, each of which uses graphics developed for the Jurassic World Alive augmented reality mobile game.

The full list of available dinosaurs includes the Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Spinosaurus, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Pteranodon, and Parasaurolophus.

Exciting news from my teammates:

Today, we’re taking a major step forward and announcing the Depth API is available in ARCore 1.18 for Android and Unity, including AR Foundation, across hundreds of millions of compatible Android devices.

As we highlighted last year, a key capability of the Depth API is occlusion: the ability for digital objects to accurately appear behind real world objects. This makes objects feel as if they’re actually in your space, creating a more realistic AR experience.

Check out the new Depth Lab app (also available as an open-source Unity project) to try it for yourself. You can play hide-the-hot-dog with Snap, as well as check out an Android-exclusive undersea lens:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nifty:

Resolve allows project teams to review large BIM files on the Oculus Quest in a collaborative environment. With a few clicks teams can bring in files from Autodesk BIM 360 and use Resolve to leave speech-to-text annotations, measure, markup, and inspect BIM properties in VR.

[Via Mugur Marculescu]

Our friends at 8th Wall (founded by a number of my former Google Photos teammates) have brought AR face effects to the Web; you can try them here.

I love seeing the continued evolution of the Web platform & democratization of machine learning, enabling the kind of “permissionless innovation” I’ve long sought to facilitate.

It’s as much about testing/showcasing emerging standards as anything. Per The Verge:

If you’ve got an Android device, just open up the Chrome browser and go to goo.gle/sodar to launch the tool, named SODAR. There’s no app required, though it won’t work on iOS or older Android devices. Your phone will use augmented reality to map the space around you, superimposing a two-meter radius circle on the view from your camera.

Sodar – use WebXR to help visualise social distancing guidelines in your environment. Using Sodar on supported mobile devices, create an augmented reality two meter radius ring around you. #hacktohelp https://t.co/Bu78QrEN9f pic.twitter.com/kufatNFDQk

— Experiments with Google (@ExpWithGoogle) May 28, 2020

So, this is what I do all day: I help shape the efforts of a bunch of smart people working to make Google better at answering questions, by making the results a lot richer & more interactive.

My subtle-not-subtle ambition is to help creative people (like those I served at Adobe) bring their beautiful, immersive work (3D & AR) to an enormous audience, by solving the last-mile problem much like Flash Player did back in the day. It’s all about my 20-year mission of standing out of creators’ light.

Recently the team has turned on some great new features & content. On both iOS & Android you can search for numerous subjects (animals, biology, anatomy, and more), then view the results in 3D or in your environment via AR. On Android you can also now navigate among search results, record videos, and share the results.

We’re partnering with BioDigital so that you can explore 11 human body systems with AR in Search on mobile. Search for circulatory system and tap “View in 3D” to see a heart up close or look up skeletal system to trace the bones in the human body and see how they connect. Read labels on each body part to learn more about it or view life-size images in AR to better understand its scale.

I can’t wait for my CrossFit-via-Zoom classes to go this way, so I’m surrounding by a bunch of glitchy avatars sweating through burpees. 🙃

Promised features:

• “Join from a VR/AR headset or PC/Phone.
• Create your lifelike avatar from a single 2D selfie in seconds.
• Organize 3d models, videos, docs, images, notes and even your own screen.
• Instantly set up rooms, scribble, search, pin information, save it, and access it anytime.
• Easily share your room and invite anyone to join your meeting”

This near-realtime segmentation, copy, and paste is wild:

Inside XR writes,

In a Twitter thread, Diagne said the secret is BASNet, an architecture for salient object detection with boundaries. (Paper here).

The delay is about 2.5 seconds to cut and 4 seconds to paste, though Diagne notes there are ways to speed that up.

The GitHub page for the project is available here.

I haven’t found the origin of this video, but it’s impressive & delightful nonetheless:

Et voila:

VR Scout writes,

The fully immersive AR experience brings to life a magical world crafted by Georges Méliès, a French illusionist and film director from the early 1900’s… Back to the Moon transports you into Méliès magical world inspired by some of his most well-known films. The experience honors Méliès unique style of filmmaking, highlighting several of his groundbreaking techniques… [It] features an original score by composer Mathieu Alvado performed by the legendary London Symphony Orchestra.

Download Back to the Moon in AR through the free Google Spotlights Stories app on Android or iOS.

[YouTube]

I’m pleased to have played an extremely tiny role in making this augmentation of restaurant search possible:

Tapping on a given item will show the dish, along with pictures also taken by customers. You can then choose to search for that dish to see what it is, or use Google Translate to display it in your native language.

Yeesh—talk about bittersweet at best:

He first appears as a crude collection of 3-D pixels—or voxels. Soon, he looks like a conglomeration of blocks morphing into the shape of an animal. Gradually, his image evolves until he becomes a sharp representation of a northern white rhino, grunting and squealing as he might in a grassy African or Asian field. There comes a moment—just a moment—when the viewer’s eyes meet his. Then, the 3-D creature vanishes, just like his sub-species, which due to human poaching is disappearing into extinction.

Smithsonian continues,

The Mill, which has studios in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bangalore and Berlin, provided animation for this project, and Dr. Andrea Banino at DeepMind, an international company that develops useful forms of artificial intelligence, provided the experimental data to set the rhino’s paths. After each two-minute episode, the rhino reappears and follows another of the three programmed paths.

Exeunt. Sadness ensues. [Vimeo]

Just a taste:

Introducing HandSpace: A collection of hand tracking oddities.
Get it here: https://t.co/ZUinIQ9FAj pic.twitter.com/L04IbsEbSv

— Daniel Beauchamp (@pushmatrix) February 27, 2020

Lots more where that came from:

[YouTube]

Eye-opening comparisons by Alvaro Gracia Montoya:

https://youtu.be/bSkPNMjRRio

Colossal notes,

2008 TC3 is the smallest shown with a mean diameter of about 4.1 meters, while the largest is 1 Ceres, which has a mean diameter of about 939 kilometers.

Related/previous: Visualizing relative tree sizes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3qpcbMV_fM&feature=youtu.be

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Back in 2014, Action Movie Dad posted a delightful vid of his niño evading the hot foot:

But now instead of needing an hour-long tutorial on how to create this effect, you can do it it realtime, with zero effort, on your friggin’ telephone. (Old Man Nack does wonder just how much this cheapens the VFX coin—but on charges progress.)

https://twitter.com/tomemrich/status/1230535407609057281

[YouTube]

The LA Times is showcasing the best Oscar dresses from the past five decades in augmented reality, commissioning artists to draw them in 3D via Google’s Tilt Brush app. You can try out the interactive experience in their app or just get a taste here:

[YouTube]

It’s pretty OT for my blog, I know, but as someone who’s been working in computer vision for the last couple of years, I find it interesting to see how others are applying these techniques.

Equipped with ultra-high definition cameras and high-powered illumination, the [Train Inspection Portal (TIP)] produces 360° scans of railcars passing through the portal at track speed. Advanced machine vision technology and software algorithms identify defects and automatically flag cars for repair.

[Vimeo]

I found myself blocked from doing anything interesting with Apple’s Reality Composer tool due to the lack of readily available USDZ-format files. My kingdom for a Lego minifig!

Therefore it’s cool to see that they’ve released a simple utility meant to facilitate conversion:

The new Reality Converter app makes it easy to convert, view, and customize USDZ 3D objects on Mac. Simply drag-and-drop common 3D file formats, such as .obj, .gltf and .usd, to view the converted USDZ result, customize material properties with your own textures, and edit file metadata. You can even preview your USDZ object under a variety of lighting and environment conditions with built-in IBL options.

This stuff is such a trip to me. You’ll get the gist in the first 30 seconds or so:

Not Hot Dog! My teammates have just shared a tech for recognizing objects & tracking them over time:

https://twitter.com/googledevs/status/1204497003746643969

The AI dev blog explains,

In MediaPipe v0.6.7.1, we are excited to release a box tracking solution, that has been powering real-time tracking in Motion Stills, YouTube’s privacy blur, and Google Lens for several years and that is leveraging classic computer vision approaches. Pairing tracking with ML inference results in valuable and efficient pipelines. In this blog, we pair box tracking with object detection to create an object detection and tracking pipeline. With tracking, this pipeline offers several advantages over running detection per frame.

Read on for more, and let us know what you create!

I’m delighted to say that my team has unveiled depth perception in ARCore. Here’s a quick taste:

Check out how it enables real objects to occlude virtual ones:

Here’s a somewhat deeper dive into the whole shebang:

The features are designed to be widely available, not requiring special sensors:

The Depth API is not dependent on specialized cameras and sensors, and it will only get better as hardware improves. For example, the addition of depth sensors, like time-of-flight (ToF) sensors, to new devices will help create more detailed depth maps to improve existing capabilities like occlusion, and unlock new capabilities such as dynamic occlusion—the ability to occlude behind moving objects.

And we’re looking for partners:

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible with the Depth API and we want to see how you will innovate with this feature. If you are interested in trying the new Depth API, please fill out our call for collaborators form.

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Looks like a simple but perhaps compelling use of ML & AR:

Zenia encompasses the best of computer vision and machine learning. She uses motion tracking and the data from thousands of yoga lessons to analyze my movements. During the practice, Zenia provides gentle feedback and also takes care of basic safety rules. 

[YouTube]

Opera Queensland & Google’s Creative Lab have teamed up to offer an AR Mozart (er, MozARt? 🙃) experience.

[T]he prototype app uses Google’s augmented reality platform ARCore to present photoreal renderings of performers against the backdrop of users’ living spaces.

I’m excited at the prospects for volumetric capture of artists in action. What a world.

Over the last couple of years I’ve pointed out a number of cool projects (e.g. driving image search via your body movements) powered by my teammates’ efforts to 1) deliver great machine learning models, and 2) enable Web browsers to run them efficiently. Now they’ve released BodyPix 2.0 (see live demo):

We are excited to announce the release of BodyPix, an open-source machine learning model which allows for person and body-part segmentation in the browser with TensorFlow.js. With default settings, it estimates and renders person and body-part segmentation at 25 fps on a 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro, and 21 fps on an iPhone X.

Enjoy!

BodyPix 2.0 has been released, including multi-person segmentation support and a new live demo!

To learn more, read the post by @tylerzhu3, @oveddan, @greenbeandou, @dsmilkov, @karlssonper, @ire_alva, @nsthorat.

Details here → https://t.co/Zq8dwiNO5A pic.twitter.com/a4qKJu9EJ1

— TensorFlow (@TensorFlow) November 18, 2019

Here’s a 2-minute concept video followed by a 6-minute on-stage demo.

Certainly looks a lot more pleasant than this classic nightmare 🙃:

Being able to place PSD layers in space & then draw a path to animate an object along it (see attached screenshot) is pretty slick. The Aero iOS app is available now, with desktop & hopefully Android to follow.

[YouTube]

How would one go about popping the iconic ol’ gal off her background to display her in 3D? That’s just one of the numerous challenges faced by the artists who enabled seeing new & up-close angles on the piece. Check out the quick tour:

[YouTube] [Via]

Instead of squeezing models down to a couple of megs & constraining rendering to what a phone alone can do, what if you could use a full-power game engine to render gigabyte-sized models in realtime in the cloud, streaming the results onto your device to combine with the world? That’s the promise of Nvidia CloudXR (which looks similar to Microsoft Azure Remote Rendering), announced this week:

[YouTube]