Really good looking!
Interesting UI/UX insight: I kinda expect to be able to "go back" by inverting the coordinates. So when I have one glyph in focus and select a new one two to the left and five down, I would love to be able to go back by selecting five up and two right to find the "old" glyph. Not sure how well this can be implemented.
Well, that is obvious, is it not? It means They are interested in The Plan and have enough power that a vague comment is all you gonna get. Cannot have Them finding out that we are on to Them. Though of course, The Plan already accounts for that, so They already know and will do Something about it. Want facts? Wake up, do your Research!
I think that as a user I'm so far removed from the actual (human) creation of software that if I think about it, I don't really care either way.
Take for example this article on Hacker News: I am reading it in a custom app someone programmed, which pulls articles hosted on Hacker News which themselves are on some server somewhere and everything gets transported across wires according to a specification. For me, this isn't some impressionist painting or heartbreaking poem - the entity that created those things is so far removed from me that it might be artificial already.
And that's coming from a kid of the 90s with some knowledge in cyber security, so potentially I could look up the documentation and maybe even the source code for the things I mentioned; if I were interested.
Dive into a forest, you'll find a couple of cool trees.
Art isn't about being cool. Art is about context.
When I tell people that art cannot be unpolitical, they react strongly, because they think about the left/right divide and how divided people are, where art is supposed to be unifying.
But art is like movement, you need an origin and a destination. Without that context, it will be just another... thing. Context makes it something.
It's not that you know the artist first and then say "this art is cool because I like the artist". The art is the means by which you know the artist. The more of their works you encounter, the closer you get to understanding the artist and what they are trying to communicate.
Ok, as someone for whom a Pinecone is the thing you can collect in the forest to burn so that your campfire makes nice sounds, what's the elevator pitch?
Not really? In 1984 you were made an active participant of the oppression. The thought police and 5 minutes hate all required your active, enthusiastic participation.
Brave New World was apathy: the system was comfortable, Soma was freely available and there was a whole system to give disruptive elements comfortable but non disruptive engagement.
The protagonist in Brave New World spends a lot of time resenting the system but really he just resents his deformity, wanted what it denied him in society, and had no real higher criticisms of it beyond what he felt he couldn't have.
1984 has coercive elements lacking from Brave New World, but the lack of any political awareness or desire to change things among the proles was critical to the mechanisms of oppression. They were generally content with their lot, and some of the ways of ensuring that have parallels to Brave New World. Violence and hate were used more than sex and drugs but still very much as opiates of the masses: encourage and satisfy base urges to quell any desire to rebel. And sex was used to some extent: although sex was officially for procreation only, prostitution was quietly encouraged among the proles.
You might even imagine 1984's society evolving into Brave New World's as the mechanisms of oppression are gradually refined. Indeed, Aldous Huxley himself suggested as much in a letter to Orwell [1].
Can someone ELI5 what this does? I read the abstract and tried to find differences in the provided examples, but I don't understand (and don't see) what the "photorealistic" part is.
Imagine history documentaries where they take an old photo and free objects from the background and move them round giving the illusion of parallax movement. This software does that in less than a second, creating a 3D model that can be accurately moved (or the camera for that matter) in your video editor. It's not new, but this one is fast and "sharp".
Oh man. I never thought about how Ken Burns might use that.
Already you sometimes see where manually cut out a foreground person from the background and enlarge them a little bit and create a multi-layer 3D effect, but it's super-primitive and I find it gimmicky.
Bringing actual 3D to old photographs as the camera slowly pans or rotates slightly feels like it could be done really tastefully and well.
Until your comment I didn't realise I'd also read it wrong (despite getting the gist of it). Attempted rephrase of the original sentence:
Imagine history documentaries where they take an old photo, free objects from the background, and then move them round to give the illusion of parallax.
Takes a 2D image and allows you to simulate moving the angle of the camera with correct-ish parallax effect and proper subject isolation (seems to be able to handle multiple subjects in the same scene as well)
I guess this is what they use for the portrait mode effects.
It turns a single photo into a rough 3D scene so you can slightly move the camera and see new, realistic views. "Photorealistic" means it preserves real textures and lighting instead of a flat depth effect. Similar behavior can be seen with Apple's Spatial Scene feature in the Photos app: https://files.catbox.moe/93w7rw.mov
Black Mirror episode portraying what this could do: https://youtu.be/XJIq_Dy--VA?t=14. If Apple ran SHARP on this photo and compared it to the show, that would be incredible.
Basically depth estimation to split the scene into various planes, and then inpainting to work out the areas in the obscured parts of the planes, and then the free movement of them to allow for parallax. Think of 2D side scrolling games that have various different background depths to give illusion of motion and depth.
From a single picture it infers a hidden 3D representation, from which you can produce photorealistic images from slightly different vantage points (novel views).
I just want to emphasize that this is not a NERF where the model magically produces an image from an angle and then you ask "ok but how did you get this?" and it throws up its hands and says "I dunno, I ran some math and I got this image" :D.
Apple does something similar right now in their photos app, generating spatial views from 2d photos, where parallax is visible by moving your phone. This paper’s technique seems to produce them faster. They also use this same tech in their Vision Pro headset to generate unique views per eye, likewise on spatialized images from Photos.
Agreed, this is a terrible presentation. The paper abstract is bordering on word salad, the demo images are meaningless and don’t show any clear difference to the previous SotA, the introduction talks about “nearby” views while the images appear to show zooming in, etc.
Super interesting! So if I understand correctly, all you need to do to have this in your home is gather a bunch of 1:2 tiles, cut them along the diagonal, and assemble them as shown? Awesome
Digital audio workstation. It's used for putting together music tracks, but... the scope of that is huge. It's probably best to find some demo/tutorial on YouTube to understand it. Even the ultra compressed bitwig6 announcement should give you an idea https://youtu.be/xJF7i3x46Ec
Digital Audio Workstation, basically all those programs with multiple tracks per music channel, tons of effects and plugins, with MIDI input to be controlled by any kind of musical devices, even macros can be assigned to specific chords or melody snippets.
Digital Audio Workstation, which is a fancy name for a kind of app where you can make a song on your computer. Whether that's a recording of an instrument or voice, or a digital instrument playing from MIDI signal (piano, synth, anything), or recorded samples from various sources, you can put all that together however you want, including all sorts of effects (lotta plugins).
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