7 ms·

Nvidia’s “Kitchen” Keynote was faked (rendered) and nobody noticed

74 points by avnigo 5y ago

avnigo 5y ago
Direct link to video explanation from article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70
- levng 5y ago
  From 23m05s
kfprt 5y ago
Is there a turing test for visual reality? This would seem to indicate that in at least some instances that reality is indistinguishable from CG.
- ben_w 5y ago
  I doubt any formal attempt to define such a test exists, given attempts at ultra-realistic painting as an art style predates Turing, let alone computer graphics: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Shishkin_-_Рожь_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Shishkin_-_Рожь...
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  That sounds like it could be interesting. It's funny how much of our "reality" / perceived universe is simply imagined or taken for granted even without any CG involved. Even in simple text, I can relate to you my relief at finding a news article on HN which was posted by my stealth marketing team on behalf of Nvidia today, or I can describe the tiny white kitten curled up on my chest as I type this from the couch I found on the street. In a way, that expression will create an effect similar to the Nvidia CG project for a lot of people. Meanwhile, I have no tiny white kitten, I'm not laying on a couch, and I don't work on a stealth marketing team. But some will go as far as visualizing what I must look like, or waxing sentimental about kittens. Some others would even doubt the retraction of those statements, merely because of a constant inner perceptive mandate which causes them to work extra hard at never getting caught closing off possibilities.
- contravariant 5y ago
  I mean it's not as if the Turing test is immensely complicated. For VR you can just make people compare a rendering with the view of a real camera and see if people can tell the difference.
beebeepka 5y ago
Huang is starting to look like Kaku. I haven't seen this one and while I am sure many have missed, there's no way "nobody noticed". Of course, this is direct PR material straight from Nvidia. Such material is hard for me to read because at 50 percent is junk words and sentences
- exdsq 5y ago
  Agreed in general but imagine a VR video game that looks so good even 20-percent think it's a movie. That's awesome.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Is that just the people with bad eyesight or who are neuro atypical and so can't see the flaws and/or tell from the weird body movements? What's the closest example in mainstream media of cg human that [almost] passes?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      CGI is much more widely used in film than I think you think it is. Half the distance/crowd shots in LotR nearly 20 years ago now were CGI, from what I remember, and e.g. the following scenes of the car sequence in Deadpool use CG humans in far more places than I’d guessed from having watched the film: https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc The cinematics in videogames likewise can be pretty convincing, even when the gameplay itself isn’t so much. Edit: And then there’s AI-generated faces like these: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
    - Fricken 5y ago
      Princess Leiah was reanimated in star wars sequels. She made it pretty deep into the uncanny valley, and died there. No digitally rendered realistic human has ever made it through the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is to be avoided at all costs, but many digital animators refuse to learn. Gollum from LOTR worked well because it didn't matter that he was in the uncanny valley. He's supposed to creep you out, it suited his character.
0xbadc0de5 5y ago
s/noticed/cared/
tomcooks 5y ago
Not dissimilar to the last broadcasted speech of the queen of England
- readthenotes1 5y ago
  There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they prefer the company of Canadians.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
It says in the YouTube video, and shows in the clips that the keynote revealed the rendering immediately as part of the show? I didn't see the full thing, but the posture and lighting in the clips in the making-of don't look like they'd have convinced anyone? (See YouTube video avnigo links). Is this just marketing saying water isn't wet or am I missing something?
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Seems like the reveal was at the end of the 2021 keynote: https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470 But he was in the kitchen at the beginning of the 2020 keynote: https://youtu.be/bOf2S7OzFEg?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOZ2BSwG4CHmKSVHxC2lyIPL&t=8 https://youtu.be/bOf2S7OzFEg?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOZ2BSwG4CHmKSVH... You can spot straight away that he looks like he's in a Zoom meeting with a fake background, he has a green halo behind his hair, and after he says "Our first kitchen keynote." he moves his shoulders and you can see the background behind his shoulders move. (Edit: what the hell, the moving background is visible in the 1080p version, but not really in the 2160p one! So I guess that's YouTube's compressor's fault.) Since they already built a very detailed model of his kitchen, it would've been more interesting if they had a multi camera setup, or even a camera that moves around, like in the BBC studio https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/olympics/58113457 https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/olympics/58113457 And the "deepfaked" Jensen seems to me is also very easy to spot... Or... was he in his real kitchen in 2020, and I'm just seeing things? At the start of his talk in 2021 the kitchen is very out of focus and blurred.
  - Washuu 5y ago
    YouTube destroys video quality at 1080p especially if the original file is not "optimal". I spent a week recently testing what combinations of bit rate, resolution, and codec gets the best results at 1080p. Short version: Upload at 4K, 2mbps x frame rate(30fps x 2mbps = 60mbps), H.265
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    The kitchen in 2020 was real. The kitchen in 2021 was a combination of real and fake shots, and you can clearly see transitions between them.
sen 5y ago
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Clickbait title, it was very clear it was rendered at the time and there was no attempt to hide it.
- r1ch 5y ago
  Indeed, the blog post is referring to this effect: https://youtu.be/KboaLRKbaBU?t=191 https://youtu.be/KboaLRKbaBU?t=191. Suggesting the entire thing was rendered is very misleading.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    There's no way it can mean just that, since that's beyond obviously not real, and not even trying to be?
    - r1ch 5y ago
      No one said it was trying to be real except the submitted title.
      - OJFord 5y ago
        Oh yeah, I didn't notice. Bizarre submission. (Unless it changed since perhaps?)
- avnigo 5y ago
  Sorry, I can’t seem to edit the title anymore, but I have to say it wasn’t publicized or known at the time that the CEO and kitchen were rendered virtually, including his motions etc. for the 14 second clip. I tried to fit that in the character count of the title because I didn’t think the article title was descriptive enough. Please flag the post if it doesn’t fit the guidelines, I didn’t mean it to be clickbaity, my apologies.
evv555 5y ago
I showed Netflix's "Love Death + Robots: Ice Age"[1] to several people and no one noticed it's CGI until I pointed it out. Even then I had to point out particular details until they really believed it. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM
- jrootabega 5y ago
  Even Topher Grace and the other one? Or just the stuff in the freezer?
- dnissley 5y ago
  All I can find by searching is that this episode was the only one to include live action (IMDb trivia, for example: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9788514/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9788514/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv) -- what makes you think it's cgi?
- seizethegdgap 5y ago
  Yeah, no, not the parts with Topher and MEW. If that was CGI, then that would be a reality-shattering jump far past the uncanny valley.
- laumars 5y ago
  There’s a reason they didn’t believe you. I mean there’s obviously parts of that short that did make use of CGI but clearly it’s predominantly live action
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  Eh? The CGI is in the freezer sure, the man and woman are 100% live action. But who didn't notice that? Or do they think a miniature civilisation actually did exist?
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    They could have filmed some of the freezer stuff live and then overlayed it on the other stuff
weare138 5y ago
Why does Nvidia's corporate blog keep referring to itself in the 3rd person? Are corporations just writing their own reviews now?
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Maybe they're facilitating people copy and pasting their text?
- initplus 5y ago
  It’s so it’s easy for jounos to copy paste the press release. You see it a lot with politicians also.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jFriedensreich 5y ago
from the very first keynote in his kitchen i was waiting for it to be rendered there was not a chance jensen would not do that one day :D
- jFriedensreich 5y ago
  one day he will reveal his signature leather jacket was real time raytraced and composited with some futuristic ai as he gave the keynote.
stickydink 5y ago
Speaking as someone who really doesn't know how long these things take, is this accurate? > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT59YOdch8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT59YOdch8M > Typically this type of project would take a team months to complete and weeks to render.
- tinco 5y ago
  Depending on how many shortcuts you take and how much resources you have, it could. If it's naïevely rendered, 66 seconds times 30fps is 1800 frames, 10 minutes rendering per frame, 12 days. This scene is very simple, so I think 10 minutes is a bit much, but in any case it's not an unreasonable statement. (The scene is so simple I feel that with PBR and some fancy postprocessing you could come very close in real time even without their RTX tech.)
leshokunin 5y ago
Interesting side effect: I couldn’t help but look at the people in the video and think they were CG as well. Maybe it’s watching it on the phone with less room to tell the details apart.
Impossible 5y ago
Can this be changed to the original title? From Our Kitchen to Yours: NVIDIA Omniverse Changes the Way Industries Collaborate
gnabgib 5y ago
The kitchen isn't fake and who's to say no one noticed? The article certainly doesn't say that, it says that a virtual model was made.. including of the CEO. Maybe I'm being fooled by rendering, but for more than a few minutes he stands slightly out of focus (a risk of IRL video), which doesn't seem like something you'd go to the trouble of rendering (not for a keynote where things should be perfect). Of course, now I've pointed that out maybe future fakers will consider this. Anyway, back to the kitchen... as they said on "The Wire" follow the spatulas. On camera-left there are red, orange and pink spatulas (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1079 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1079), they even move (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1990 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1990).. presumably inconsistency across multiple takes and editing. Also note what's on the counter to his right. At the point they switch to the virtual kitchen (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470), we get the "unnecessary blurry zoom effect" (used in TV to save interpolation on eg the living room -> house -> city -> country -> planet zoom out).. now the items to his right are different (there was no American flag in that white dish just now) - there's less items, and the spatulas... well even the modellers refused to make so many, dropping the orange, red, and, pink ones from the container.

74 points by avnigo 5y ago

Direct link to video explanation from article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70

levng 5y ago
From 23m05s

kfprt 5y ago

Is there a turing test for visual reality? This would seem to indicate that in at least some instances that reality is indistinguishable from CG.

ben_w 5y ago
I doubt any formal attempt to define such a test exists, given attempts at ultra-realistic painting as an art style predates Turing, let alone computer graphics: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Shishkin_-_Рожь_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Shishkin_-_Рожь...
themodelplumber 5y ago
That sounds like it could be interesting. It's funny how much of our "reality" / perceived universe is simply imagined or taken for granted even without any CG involved. Even in simple text, I can relate to you my relief at finding a news article on HN which was posted by my stealth marketing team on behalf of Nvidia today, or I can describe the tiny white kitten curled up on my chest as I type this from the couch I found on the street. In a way, that expression will create an effect similar to the Nvidia CG project for a lot of people. Meanwhile, I have no tiny white kitten, I'm not laying on a couch, and I don't work on a stealth marketing team. But some will go as far as visualizing what I must look like, or waxing sentimental about kittens. Some others would even doubt the retraction of those statements, merely because of a constant inner perceptive mandate which causes them to work extra hard at never getting caught closing off possibilities.
contravariant 5y ago
I mean it's not as if the Turing test is immensely complicated. For VR you can just make people compare a rendering with the view of a real camera and see if people can tell the difference.

beebeepka 5y ago

Huang is starting to look like Kaku. I haven't seen this one and while I am sure many have missed, there's no way "nobody noticed". Of course, this is direct PR material straight from Nvidia. Such material is hard for me to read because at 50 percent is junk words and sentences

exdsq 5y ago
Agreed in general but imagine a VR video game that looks so good even 20-percent think it's a movie. That's awesome.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Is that just the people with bad eyesight or who are neuro atypical and so can't see the flaws and/or tell from the weird body movements? What's the closest example in mainstream media of cg human that [almost] passes?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    CGI is much more widely used in film than I think you think it is. Half the distance/crowd shots in LotR nearly 20 years ago now were CGI, from what I remember, and e.g. the following scenes of the car sequence in Deadpool use CG humans in far more places than I’d guessed from having watched the film: https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc The cinematics in videogames likewise can be pretty convincing, even when the gameplay itself isn’t so much. Edit: And then there’s AI-generated faces like these: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
  - Fricken 5y ago
    Princess Leiah was reanimated in star wars sequels. She made it pretty deep into the uncanny valley, and died there. No digitally rendered realistic human has ever made it through the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is to be avoided at all costs, but many digital animators refuse to learn. Gollum from LOTR worked well because it didn't matter that he was in the uncanny valley. He's supposed to creep you out, it suited his character.

0xbadc0de5 5y ago

s/noticed/cared/

tomcooks 5y ago

Not dissimilar to the last broadcasted speech of the queen of England

readthenotes1 5y ago
There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they prefer the company of Canadians.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

It says in the YouTube video, and shows in the clips that the keynote revealed the rendering immediately as part of the show? I didn't see the full thing, but the posture and lighting in the clips in the making-of don't look like they'd have convinced anyone? (See YouTube video avnigo links). Is this just marketing saying water isn't wet or am I missing something?

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Seems like the reveal was at the end of the 2021 keynote: https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470 But he was in the kitchen at the beginning of the 2020 keynote: https://youtu.be/bOf2S7OzFEg?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOZ2BSwG4CHmKSVHxC2lyIPL&t=8 https://youtu.be/bOf2S7OzFEg?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOZ2BSwG4CHmKSVH... You can spot straight away that he looks like he's in a Zoom meeting with a fake background, he has a green halo behind his hair, and after he says "Our first kitchen keynote." he moves his shoulders and you can see the background behind his shoulders move. (Edit: what the hell, the moving background is visible in the 1080p version, but not really in the 2160p one! So I guess that's YouTube's compressor's fault.) Since they already built a very detailed model of his kitchen, it would've been more interesting if they had a multi camera setup, or even a camera that moves around, like in the BBC studio https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/olympics/58113457 https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/olympics/58113457 And the "deepfaked" Jensen seems to me is also very easy to spot... Or... was he in his real kitchen in 2020, and I'm just seeing things? At the start of his talk in 2021 the kitchen is very out of focus and blurred.
- Washuu 5y ago
  YouTube destroys video quality at 1080p especially if the original file is not "optimal". I spent a week recently testing what combinations of bit rate, resolution, and codec gets the best results at 1080p. Short version: Upload at 4K, 2mbps x frame rate(30fps x 2mbps = 60mbps), H.265
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  The kitchen in 2020 was real. The kitchen in 2021 was a combination of real and fake shots, and you can clearly see transitions between them.

sen 5y ago

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Clickbait title, it was very clear it was rendered at the time and there was no attempt to hide it.

r1ch 5y ago
Indeed, the blog post is referring to this effect: https://youtu.be/KboaLRKbaBU?t=191 https://youtu.be/KboaLRKbaBU?t=191. Suggesting the entire thing was rendered is very misleading.
- OJFord 5y ago
  There's no way it can mean just that, since that's beyond obviously not real, and not even trying to be?
  - r1ch 5y ago
    No one said it was trying to be real except the submitted title.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Oh yeah, I didn't notice. Bizarre submission. (Unless it changed since perhaps?)
avnigo 5y ago
Sorry, I can’t seem to edit the title anymore, but I have to say it wasn’t publicized or known at the time that the CEO and kitchen were rendered virtually, including his motions etc. for the 14 second clip. I tried to fit that in the character count of the title because I didn’t think the article title was descriptive enough. Please flag the post if it doesn’t fit the guidelines, I didn’t mean it to be clickbaity, my apologies.

evv555 5y ago

I showed Netflix's "Love Death + Robots: Ice Age"[1] to several people and no one noticed it's CGI until I pointed it out. Even then I had to point out particular details until they really believed it. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM

jrootabega 5y ago
Even Topher Grace and the other one? Or just the stuff in the freezer?
dnissley 5y ago
All I can find by searching is that this episode was the only one to include live action (IMDb trivia, for example: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9788514/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9788514/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv) -- what makes you think it's cgi?
seizethegdgap 5y ago
Yeah, no, not the parts with Topher and MEW. If that was CGI, then that would be a reality-shattering jump far past the uncanny valley.
laumars 5y ago
There’s a reason they didn’t believe you. I mean there’s obviously parts of that short that did make use of CGI but clearly it’s predominantly live action
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
Eh? The CGI is in the freezer sure, the man and woman are 100% live action. But who didn't notice that? Or do they think a miniature civilisation actually did exist?
- jrootabega 5y ago
  They could have filmed some of the freezer stuff live and then overlayed it on the other stuff

weare138 5y ago

Why does Nvidia's corporate blog keep referring to itself in the 3rd person? Are corporations just writing their own reviews now?

mhh__ 5y ago
Maybe they're facilitating people copy and pasting their text?
initplus 5y ago
It’s so it’s easy for jounos to copy paste the press release. You see it a lot with politicians also.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jFriedensreich 5y ago

from the very first keynote in his kitchen i was waiting for it to be rendered there was not a chance jensen would not do that one day :D

jFriedensreich 5y ago
one day he will reveal his signature leather jacket was real time raytraced and composited with some futuristic ai as he gave the keynote.

stickydink 5y ago

Speaking as someone who really doesn't know how long these things take, is this accurate? > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT59YOdch8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT59YOdch8M > Typically this type of project would take a team months to complete and weeks to render.

tinco 5y ago
Depending on how many shortcuts you take and how much resources you have, it could. If it's naïevely rendered, 66 seconds times 30fps is 1800 frames, 10 minutes rendering per frame, 12 days. This scene is very simple, so I think 10 minutes is a bit much, but in any case it's not an unreasonable statement. (The scene is so simple I feel that with PBR and some fancy postprocessing you could come very close in real time even without their RTX tech.)

leshokunin 5y ago

Interesting side effect: I couldn’t help but look at the people in the video and think they were CG as well. Maybe it’s watching it on the phone with less room to tell the details apart.

Impossible 5y ago

Can this be changed to the original title? From Our Kitchen to Yours: NVIDIA Omniverse Changes the Way Industries Collaborate

gnabgib 5y ago

The kitchen isn't fake and who's to say no one noticed? The article certainly doesn't say that, it says that a virtual model was made.. including of the CEO. Maybe I'm being fooled by rendering, but for more than a few minutes he stands slightly out of focus (a risk of IRL video), which doesn't seem like something you'd go to the trouble of rendering (not for a keynote where things should be perfect). Of course, now I've pointed that out maybe future fakers will consider this. Anyway, back to the kitchen... as they said on "The Wire" follow the spatulas. On camera-left there are red, orange and pink spatulas (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1079 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1079), they even move (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1990 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1990).. presumably inconsistency across multiple takes and editing. Also note what's on the counter to his right. At the point they switch to the virtual kitchen (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470 https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470), we get the "unnecessary blurry zoom effect" (used in TV to save interpolation on eg the living room -> house -> city -> country -> planet zoom out).. now the items to his right are different (there was no American flag in that white dish just now) - there's less items, and the spatulas... well even the modellers refused to make so many, dropping the orange, red, and, pink ones from the container.