As an aside: owls being wise is a cultural belief. In India, owls are considered unintelligent, and calling someone an owl is akin to calling them a fool. Interesting how these perceptions are diametrically opposite!
In Finnish, owl translates as pöllö, which in modern day everyday spoken language also means dumb/silly/crazy. I can't quickly find any evidence of any old owl symbology that wouldn't just be imported from a different culture. Most of the surrounding countries considered owls to be birds of death, accidents and misfortune. So yeah, I'd say Finland agrees with India on this.
I too was inspired to use this dataset in some way, and made this toy program where you point your camera at your face, and it renders your eyes and nose as doodles (and barfs out more if you open your mouth): https://github.com/goberoi/sketch_face
Monkey Island and its sequel are some of the defining games of my childhood. My brother and I played all the Sierra Games, and Lucas Arts games, and while we have many loves (Heroes Quest/Quest for Glory, Indian Jones), Monkey Island was by far our favorite.
We few years ago we were lucky enough to meet Ron at PAX when he was there promoting Thimbleweed Park. Since then, I saw him fairly often at a neighborhood coffee shop here in Seattle.
Earlier this year, at the start of the pandemic, my brother and his partner ended up making an adventure game in the style of Monkey Island. It's almost an homage and has a few shout outs to those in the know. Check it out here:
Yes, this sort of tech is likely to make its way into CGI. Some relevant resources if you're interested:
1. This post shows how GANs were used to replicate the Princess Leia scene in Rogue One. The scene in the movie required a team of special effects artists, whereas this required access to lots of images of Carrie Fischer, a GPU, and this technology: https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-video-uses-the-power-of-deepfak...
tl;dr: Instagram is significantly tightening up access to their platform. The existing API is being deprecated in favor of a heavier permissions based system, and functionality available to all today, will be restricted to medium-to-large businesses down the road.
This is relevant to the HN community: builders who have enjoyed access to Instagram will now be severely restricted, which will limit future applications.
Finally: this is probably not a huge surprise. LinkedIn did this a couple of years ago, and of course Facebook has been tightening up access for years.
Why is this interesting? In short: a great new activation function that may challenge the dominance of ReLU.
Longer story:
Today, ReLU is the most popular activation function for deep networks (along with its variants like leaky ReLU or parametric ReLU).
This paper from the Google Brain team is ~2 weeks old, and shows that SWISH, a new activation function, "improves top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet by 0.9% for Mobile NASNetA
and 0.6% for Inception-ResNet-v2" by simply replacing ReLU with SWISH.
SWISH is equal to x * sigmoid(x), so not that much harder to compute either.
Can the new camera technology be used to map spaces as big as rooms?
If so, this could be game changing for allowing the creation of VR spaces quickly and inexpensively. E.g., play a VR game in your real house after mapping it with your iPhone X. Or better, do a detailed remodel in VR before doing it in real life.
A lot of commercial uses of VR technology (e.g., construction, industrial design, etc.) can benefit from inexpensive, and accurate mapping. Today, the alternative is to get an architect to build a model of your house, to build a crude version yourself, have a Hololens/Tango phone/or other nascent and expensive technology.
If not, what truly is the game changing aspect of these cameras + specialized compute for machine learning/neural nets? They have to have thought through dozens of use cases beyond photos, animated emojis, and other trivial entertainment... right?
Someone has already built a measuring tape app out of this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpEWv9_6Cg. Not exactly mapping as you're describing, but it's an interesting use case.
They are going to expose some of this functionality as part of their AR libraries. We know this from their Snapchat demo, as well as the gaming demo (though that used the rear camera, not front one).
So... yes, developers will be able to get their hands on some of this tech, but how much can we do with it?
If room mapping was truly possible, I would imagine they would have done more in their demo with this, e.g. see the Hololens game where robots come flying out of walls, and hide behind your couch. That demo was more substantial than seeing a flat tabletop with a projected 3d game, or a projected 3d robots standing on a flat basketball court.
I think you guys are talking about two different sensors. The 3-D sensor (the one that works like Kinect) is only on the front of the phone and I assume only for short range. That's the one the Snapchat demo used in the one that Face ID uses.
The AR demos of games use the normal cameras on the back of the device. That stuff will be available to any device 6S and up.
Did I miss it, or are there no virtual reality startups on this list?
I'm a wee bit surprised: VR is nascent and there aren't enough devices out there to build sustainable businesses shipping content, but I would have expected at least 1 or 2.
There are a couple -- in this article they mentioned Escher Reality, which is providing a backend to AR. Definitely think there will be more in the future as things progress!
