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Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

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Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#21

Post by alehul »

brwsr wrote: post #15

Definitely cool technology, only not for me. I'll never place a camera in my home that is connected to some cloud service or company database. That data is simply too valuable for me to send out to a "trusted" party.

I'd also like to hear more about the tech to know how seriously they're taking privacy... I was already against an Amazon Echo in my home, and that only records audio rather than video.

(For the convenience, I ended up using a Google Home, and I'll likely switch to an Apple HomePod next as they seem the most trustworthy with your data.)

If Piccolo will make money through data (like Amazon or Google), there's virtually no way for it to be non-intrusive unlike with audio, as we'd just be using it for turning off our lights rather than searching for the nearest French restaurant. Data would have to come from visual recognition. Hopefully the lack of connection needed to a cloud in this situation will result in more security? Anyway, curious to see how it works.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#22

Post by marlonmisra »

sergiotapia wrote: post #13

Do you see the entire video and process it, or do you only see the skeleton + target areas?

We do some preprocessing on-device and run our more complex models in the cloud. It’s similar to Alexa which always listens for the trigger word, but only streams to servers for the few seconds afterwords. While some image data is processed in the cloud, it’s never stored.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#23

Post by marlonmisra »

hashkb wrote: post #10

> but the more complicated models are run in the cloud This is a massive problem with home automation tools today. I need to rely on Comcast to stay alive to be able to turn lights on and off in my house? To me, it's an absolute dealbreaker. I've spent more time than I feel like I should have had to in order to control devices I own without any data leaving my LAN. Am I the only one who feels like it's a totally absu…

Our first prototype ran locally end-to-end. To make that work we used a Jetson TX2 ($600 computer), but the performance was abysmal. In a few years, it might be possible to do what we're doing locally and at a reasonable price.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#24

Post by epberry »

Very cool. I shudder to think of the GPU costs to run these models though. Perhaps they're using TPUs to be as efficient as possible. If you imagine a room occupied in the evening by people for several hours and you have any decent framerate, you're running your pose estimation network on each frame for several hours. And these models are big as far as I have seen. So that pretty much means you have one cloud GPU per camera allocated every evening. I suppose another option is they are running pieces of the network on the device but I think that's unlikely.

Of course these models are getting smaller over time and I'm incredibly impressed that these guys have put together the hardware, computer vision, and cloud setup. I also think they've nailed the MVP - not too easy but not too complicated either assuming they have decent models.

I'm signing up!

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#25

Post by neilraina »

pavlov wrote: post #5

Is it basically a smaller Kinect without the Xbox platform tie-in? Looks very neat. If you open the API, I’d love to play with it!

That's right, Piccolo is not tied to any console or platform. We're also very excited about opening this up. We think there is potential to build really powerful applications with the information available here. Stay tuned!

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#26

Post by JamesCoyne »

From the Hitchiker's Guide:

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#27

Post by neilraina »

brwsr wrote: post #15

Definitely cool technology, only not for me. I'll never place a camera in my home that is connected to some cloud service or company database. That data is simply too valuable for me to send out to a "trusted" party.

That's a fair concern. We are very serious about privacy. Existing cameras today focus on security so they have to store your data. Piccolo on the other hand is for real-time interactions so images are never stored.

Re: Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

#29

Post by pavlov »

epberry wrote: post #24

Very cool. I shudder to think of the GPU costs to run these models though. Perhaps they're using TPUs to be as efficient as possible. If you imagine a room occupied in the evening by people for several hours and you have any decent framerate, you're running your pose estimation network on each frame for several hours. And these models are big as far as I have seen. So that pretty much means you have one cloud GPU per…

I think you're overestimating the processing requirements. The original 2010 Kinect did fundamentally similar processing (multi-person tracking and skeletal mapping) on the Xbox 360 which had a PowerPC CPU from 2005.
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