17 ms·

A few years ago, I would have thought this technical feat was amazing, and stopped there. Now I think it's creepy. Ah how times have changed...

• cal5k 8y ago
  There's nothing inherently creepy about it. I imagine it will be very useful for adding context to a scene - which is important for self-driving cars, AR, image classification, etc. If you take a bunch of photos involving people doing things and extract pose information, I'd imagine it would be helpful in figuring out what's going on in other situations that are otherwise dissimilar.
• rojobuffalo 8y ago
  Is there any other upside to this besides novelty and amusement? It's easy to imagine a dozen applications where this would threaten human privacy and safety.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    What's wrong with amusement? Seriously, I'd love to have this in videogames - to import myself and other people into the game. I'd also love to get my hands on a good, fully automated [series of photos] -> [textured 3D human model] pipeline, for anything from silly renders to 3D printing mementos. Technology is inherently usable both for good and evil. You get both by default. It takes active countermeasures - usually non-tech, like regulations - to limit evil applications without sacrificing the good ones. As a society, we do that to some extent, but unfortunately we're not as successful as I'd like (e.g. if it were up to me, I'd seriously curtail the advertising industry).
    • namibj 8y ago
      The structure from motion stuff is good enough if you got a couple of pictures from around the human without the human moving (much), but I suspect getting enough pictures without the human moving too far might be difficult.
    • rojobuffalo 8y ago
      I didn't say there was anything wrong with amusement. I just asked if there was any utility besides that. If it's only value is amusement and the potential negatives are enormous, it's at least worth a discussion. I don't think it's right to just shrug and say "everything can be used for good or bad". The details matter. If you're talking about a Yo-yo, yeah, you can hit people with it or just amuse yourself; nothing catastrophic is likely to happen. This tech though has greater implications.
  • pavel_lishin 8y ago
    > Is there any other upside to this besides novelty and amusement? * Automated injury detection. You've got a warehouse, you've got cameras, now you've got an instant alert when one of your workers appears to be injured but out of sight of other workers. You've got street cameras, now you've got automatic detection of someone having a heart attack and laying down on a sidewalk. (Dystopian application: "homeless person detected, deploying zap-drones") Hospitals and old folks' homes could use this, too. * Lifeguard Assist programs - automatic detection of drowning-like behaviors. (Of course, over-reliance on this would be bad...) * Children separated from parents might be easier to detect in places like malls, etc. (I'm going to stop listing obvious parenthetical dystopian applications)
    • applecrazy 8y ago
      I see a huge possibility of replacing expensive mocap hardware and software using this tech, allowing for video games and VFX to become more accessible and use commodity hardware. I’ve been eyeing things like the Kinect and iPhone X face tracking for this kind of task (for a fun side project I’m working on), but it would be great if I could track at least position and pose of multiple actors in a scene using just a standard webcam or camcorder.
    • rojobuffalo 8y ago
      Those are good examples. Basically surveying groups of people for body language that indicates a dangerous situation might be unfolding.
  • bsenftner 8y ago
    This is a key tech behind personalized advertising: replacing actors in ads with anyone. From an Advertising Industry perspective, this is Holy Grail ingredients.
    • wiz21c 8y ago
      Could you explain why this is Holy Grail ? As someone who's totally hostile to advertisement my brain is not wired to actually envision that holy grail. I ask the question honestly: having my face on a picture with a celebrity rings zero bells for me (even if it was RMS :-))
      • bsenftner 8y ago
        Perhaps it is not meant for you, but for fans of a given media whose popularity warrants creating the consumer-insertion profitable. It is a different type of media, beyond product placements; consider the ability for fantasy fulfillment or impressionability. A lot of marketers would love to have such a technology. The idea is to offer it to consumers who willingly insert themselves into desirable scenarios for the media itself. A lot of consumers would do this, and the product placement capabilities are endless.
    • rojobuffalo 8y ago
      Hard to count that as a positive, but I see your point. Seems like it would benefit a very small group.
  • skybrian 8y ago
    Driverless cars doing better at recognizing humans?
    • rojobuffalo 8y ago
      Or projecting human motion. That's a fair one.
  • avenius 8y ago
    I imagine this could be developed to observe e.g. a budding powerlifter's form, pointing out any obvious errors and putting hordes of PTs out of work ;)