Category Archives: Cool Tech

180 Options Multiply

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Get ready for an onslaught of new immersive video cameras.

Youtube launched the VR180 format last year and parent company Google has just partnered with Lenovo to make the world’s simplest point and shoot camera, the Mirage.

180 is the shorthand for VR180, which is the moniker for 3D VR180. The two front-facing lenses approximate your eyes, creating depth.

Lenovo has published the camera’s specs but the biggest drawback I see is the lack of a view screen. It truly is a point and shoot camera, although you could use the onboard WIFI to send the picture to your smartphone for viewing.

David Pierce, writing for Wired, says:

“VR180, like most things in VR right now, is the simple-but-usable version of what will someday be much cooler. It exists for a few reasons: because 360-degree video is actually really complicated to do well, because there aren’t many great ways to watch 360 video, and because even when they do watch super-immersive footage, viewers don’t tend to look around much. With VR180, your camera can look and operate more like a regular point-and-shoot, and viewers get a similarly immersive feel without having to constantly spin around.”

Digital Trends did a review at CES 2018.

You can pre-order the Mirage Camera now from B&H.

There’s also the YI Horizon VR180 coming soon and it includes a view screen, higher resolution and HDMI out, I believe. See Think Media‘s review:

My take: I’m a big fan of 180 and can’t wait to play around with both of these cameras. (Also, I wish the ‘VR’ label would just go away since this technology is not “virtual reality” but basically “reality”. Virtual Reality to me means computer-generated environments; video games are a prime example. 180 is as close as we’re going to come to reality other than actually being there.)

Isaac Asimov hitches a ride on Elon Musk’s Roadster to Mars

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Elon Musk, Earth’s real life Tony Stark (see this infographic and this tidbit for proof,) just sent his Tesla Roadster into space aboard SpaceX‘s Falcon Heavy rocket on February 6, 2018.

See four hours of live footage of Starman and the Tesla Roadster in space.

See where Starman and Elon Musk’s Roadster are right now.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to the “Don’t Panic!” message on the dashboard, there’s a second, hidden, message tucked away in the Roadster.

Nova Spivack of the Arch Mission Foundation, whose mission is to preserve and disseminate humanity’s knowledge across time and space for the benefit of future generations, explains:

“We are very happy to announce that our first Arch [data crystals that last billions of years] library, containing the Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy, was carried as payload on today’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, enroute to permanent orbit around the Sun. We are eternally grateful to Elon Musk and his incredible team for advocating the Arch Mission Foundation and giving us our first ride into space.”

This is not the first time messages have been sent into space physically.

That honour goes to the Pioneer Plaques of 1972 and ’73 and the Voyager Golden Records of 1977.

Interestingly, interstellar radio messages predate that by a decade.

My take: did you know Marvel Comic’s Howard Stark, Ironman’s father, was modelled on Howard Hughes? Talk about coming full circle.

Kodak looks to the future and the past

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There is good news and bad news from Kodak.

Some will remember Kodak as the leading photography film company of the last millenium, toying with bankruptcy in 2012.

The good: Kodak has fully jumped into 360 VR with the Pixpro ORBIT360 4K:

“The KODAK PIXPRO Orbit360 4K VR Camera adopts a minimalist approach to an all-in-one 360 ̊ VR camera, with two fixed focus lenses housed by a futuristic camera body. Each curved lens is designed to work in tandem, to capture full 360 ̊ 4K Video and easily upload 360 ̊ videos and photos to social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube via the camera’s Smart Device App while on the go.”

The real news from CES 2018 however is that Kodak plans two new cameras for later this year. See 2:05 in this report from Digital Trends:

The bad: Kodak has stated that the price for its upcoming Super 8 camera will be in the $2,500 to $3,000 range, which is three to five times more than originally planned.

They also released some test footage:

To my eye this is soft and jittery. I much prefer the rock-steady footage from Logmar:

My take: On one hand, I’m really looking forward to Kodak’s 360 camera that can fold out into a 180 3D mode because I feel this format has the best chance to win the immersive VR stakes. On the other hand, shame on Kodak for jacking up the price of their inferior Super 8 camera.

AI reads minds, makes pictures

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As reported by Tristan Greene on The Next Web, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan have created a deep neural network that can decode brainwaves.

That’s right, AI that can read your mind.

Tristan summarizes:

“When these machines are learning to “read our minds” they’re doing it the exact same way human psychics do: by guessing. If you think of the letter “A” the computer doesn’t actually know what you’re thinking, it just knows what the brainwaves look like when you’re thinking it…. AI is able to do a lot of guessing though — so far the field’s greatest trick has been to give AI the ability to ask and answer its own questions at mind-boggling speed. The machine takes all the information it has — brainwaves in this case — and turns it into an image. It does this over and over until (without seeing the same image as the human, obviously) it can somewhat recreate that image.”

Or, as Guohua Shen, Tomoyasu Horikawa, Kei Majima and Yukiyasu Kamitani illustrate:

To my eye, some of the results look awfully reminiscent of William Turner‘s oil paintings, particularly Snow Storm.

See the full paper.

My take: Let’s be honest. This technology, as amazing as it is, is not yet ‘magical.’ (Arthur C. Clarke‘s third law is, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) However, if we think about it a bit and mull over the possibilities, this might one day allow you to transcribe your thoughts, paint pictures with your mind or even become telepathic.

Google uses neural net to synthesize female voice

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Research at Google is making huge advances in text-to-speech (TTS) technology. Check this out:

From their Twitter post:

“Building on TTS models like ‘Tacotron’ and deep generative models of raw audio like ‘Wavenet’, we introduce ‘Tacotron 2’ a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text.”

How do they do it? From their blog post:

“In a nutshell it works like this: We use a sequence-to-sequence model optimized for TTS to map a sequence of letters to a sequence of features that encode the audio. These features, an 80-dimensional audio spectrogram with frames computed every 12.5 milliseconds, capture not only pronunciation of words, but also various subtleties of human speech, including volume, speed and intonation. Finally these features are converted to a 24 kHz waveform using a WaveNet-like architecture.”

The results are amazing.

Want more? Here’s the full research paper.

The limitations? Some complex words, sentiment and generation in real time. “Each of these is an interesting research problem on its own,” they conclude.

Listen to more samples.

My take: I’ve used TTS functionality to generate speech for songs and for voice-over. I love it! As the quality improves to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from human voice, I will admit that I’m not quite sure what that will mean in a future where we won’t be sure if the voice we’re hearing is human or robot.

Google wants you to have the best selfie

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Building on last year’s GIF builder, Motion Stills, Google Research has just released two more ‘appsperiments‘ in time for your holiday merriment: Scrubbies and Selfissimo!

Scrubbies lets you “shoot a video in the app and then remix it by scratching it like a DJ. Scrubbing with one finger plays the video. Scrubbing with two fingers captures the playback so you can save or share it.”

Selfissimo! lets you “tap the screen to start a photoshoot. The app encourages you to pose and captures a photo whenever you stop moving. Tap the screen to end the session and review the resulting contact sheet.”

Are you worried that taking so many selfies might give you “selfitis” and turn you into a narcissist? Well, don’t. Snopes disproved that potential mental disorder.

What I love about Selfissimo! is that by taking the photos for you, it gives you more of a true photo session experience, heightened by the fact it only shoots in black and white. Think of the photo shoot scene in Austin Powers ‘The Spy Who Shagged Me’, which itself is homage to the photo shoot scene in Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1966 masterful film ‘Blow-Up’.

My take: I highly recommend Selfissimo! because it’s so much fun! Here’s to a great 2018, everyone!

Battling AI’s create new realities

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The adage “Seeing is believing” is no longer true.

Three researchers, Ming-Yu Liu, Thomas Breuel and Jan Kautz, working for Nvidia, have created an AI that can generate life-like images.

In their system, multiple neural networks learn together by trying to fool each other with better and better solutions to the problem at hand. These are generative adversarial networks or GANs.

See their paper and GitHub. A sample below:

My take: this is kinda scary. Neat to think of “environmental” filters to add to genuine footage (think Nighttime, Winter, Rainy, etc.) but that this technology can create genuine-looking unreal footage is downright Orwellian. How do we distinguish true from fiction, real from fake? The only conclusion is that everything is now suspect. Sad.

Seeing is not believing

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At the recent Adobe Max conference, one of the sneak peeks really caught my eye: Adobe Cloak.

This “content aware fill for video” is amazing and could be revolutionary if it ever sees the light of day in a product or service.

It’s powered by Adobe Sensei and it works by imagining what’s underneath the objects you want to remove.

By the way, if you want to do this today, you can use the Remove Module in Mocha Pro.

My take: the ease and speed of this is literally astounding. There were lots of great sneak peeks this year, including SonicScape for 360/VR sound editing. First come the tools, then comes the art.

Computational Video Editing may replace Assistant Editors

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Eric Escobar writes on Film Independent about his trip to Siggraph 2017 and the one technology that blew his mind: Computational Video Editing.

Three researchers from Stanford University and one from Adobe demonstrated a system that:

“automatically selects the most appropriate clip from one of the input takes, for each line of dialogue, based on a user-specified set of film-editing idioms. Our system starts by segmenting the input script into lines of dialogue and then splitting each input take into a sequence of clips time-aligned with each line. Next it labels the script and the clips with high-level structural information (e.g., emotional sentiment of dialogue, camera framing of clip, etc.). After this pre-process, our interface offers a set of basic idioms that users can combine in a variety of ways to build custom editing styles. Our system encodes each basic idiom as a Hidden Markov Model that relates editing decisions to the labels extracted in the pre-process. For short scenes (< 2 minutes, 8-16 takes, 6-27 lines of dialogue) applying the user-specified combination of idioms to the pre-processed inputs generates an edited sequence in 2-3 seconds.”

That’s right. Three seconds. For a 90 second scene. Versus 90 minutes for a human. If my math is correct, that makes this system 180,000% faster!

The idioms, from the research notes:

  • Avoid jump cuts
  • Change zoom gradually
  • Emphasize character
  • Intensify emotion
  • Mirror position
  • Peaks and valleys
  • Performance fast/slow
  • Performance loud/quiet
  • Short lines
  • Speaker visible
  • Start wide
  • Zoom consistent
  • Zoom in/out

Editors combine a number of these idioms and weight them to generate different assemblies of the rushes, automatically.

Of course, editors will then proceed to polish these rough cuts, tweaking the edits and finessing the sound.

My take: This promises to take out all the tedium in editing and let editors focus on truly being creative. Eric envisions a client-side version of this in which every viewer’s version of a film is custom-generated for them, based on their favourite editing style. That may be going a little too far but what I find fascinating about this system is that it starts with the script, once again highlighting how crucial it is.

OPA chips may one day replace optical lenses

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Caltech researchers have created an optical phased array chip that can capture images.

The technological breakthrough has the potential to revolutionize photography.

Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech, claims:

We’ve created a single thin layer of integrated silicon photonics that emulates the lens and sensor of a digital camera, reducing the thickness and cost of digital cameras. It can mimic a regular lens, but can switch from a fish-eye to a telephoto lens instantaneously — with just a simple adjustment in the way the array receives light.

He continues:

“The ability to control all the optical properties of a camera electronically using a paper-thin layer of low-cost silicon photonics without any mechanical movement, lenses, or mirrors, opens a new world of imagers that could look like wallpaper, blinds, or even wearable fabric.”

Read the PDF.

My take: This is the perhaps unseen conclusion of digitization. First film. Soon lenses. Both usurped by ones and zeroes. I wonder what the future of visual storytelling will look like when almost anything flat — walls, windows, ceilings — can become image capturing tools.