Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

blogs.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 239 posts

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#151

Post by nimbleal »

ineedasername wrote: post #62
olladecarne wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's so many things we invent with good intentions but in the end go terribly wrong and I think this is one of those things. I think it's ok to mourn and remember the past, but moving on and accepting reality is important to a healthy life. Let's be real though, the startup that makes this but appeals to our worst instincts make bank. I can't imagine how much more messed up future generations will be as we keep ma…

"mourn and move on" is a somewhat Western concept of dealing with death. Plenty of cultures around the world have developed different practices, up to religious forms of ancestor worship.

These practices would typically be associated with the idea that the dead have a genuine existence beyond simply “existing in my memory of them” and would be restricted in the forms they take by surrounding ritual, so I’m not sure there’s a direct point of comparison, though?

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#152

Post by nl »

Next time someone says "why does everyone in AI use NVidia and CUDA"? this is why.

They do high quality research and almost inevitably end up releasing the code and models. It's possible to reconstruct all that as a non-CUDA model, but when you want to use it, why would you when it's going to take months of work to get something that isn't as optimised?

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#153

Post by JKCalhoun »

baron816 wrote: post #31

It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. As I’ve gotten older, and my parents get older as well, I’ve been thinking more about what my life will be like in old age (and beyond too). I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That…

Sounds like the end of the movie: "A.I.".

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#154

Post by eyelidlessness »

bobthechef wrote: post #150
baron816 wrote: post #31

It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. As I’ve gotten older, and my parents get older as well, I’ve been thinking more about what my life will be like in old age (and beyond too). I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That…

> Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That isn't necessarily what eternal life would be. Indeed, eternity is not temporal at all. For example, in the Catholic understanding of heaven, those in heaven exist in aeveternity or aevum[0], a state in between the temporal and the eternal. Eternity[1] is proper only to God and is by definition ti…

This in no way represents my views, it's far from them. But I vouched for this comment because it deserves to be a part of this conversation.

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#155

Post by Zenst »

My first thoughts seeing this is darn, Facebook will with there metaverse, be drinking this up for content. So much so that my thoughts of, would I be shocked if Facebook/Meta made a play to buy Nvidia! Certainly wouldn't shock me as much now as it would before this given how they are banking upon the metaverse/VR being there new growth divergance, what with the leveling of with current services user base after well over a decade and a half.

Certainly though, game franchised films would become a lot more imersive, though I do hope that whole avenue dosn't become sameish with this tech overly learned upon.

But one thing for sure, I can't wait to bullet-time the film - The Wizzard of OZ with this tech :).

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#156

Post by zem »

chrstphrknwtn wrote: post #60
baron816 wrote: post #31

It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. As I’ve gotten older, and my parents get older as well, I’ve been thinking more about what my life will be like in old age (and beyond too). I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That…

My gut reaction to 'recreating loved ones in VR' is that it would be torturous more than soothing. Once a person dies, they're gone. The world is different, and nothing will bring them back. Spending time with a simulacrum isn't really spending time with a loved one.

Greg Egan's "zendegi" is a very good exploration of that idea. set in the fairly near future, so relatable.

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#157

Post by CobrastanJorji »

corysama wrote: post #88
sorenjan wrote: post #44

I don't really understand why NeRFs would be particularly useful in more than a few niche cases, perhaps because I don't fully understand what they really are. My impression is that you take a bunch of photos in various places and directions, then you use those as samples of a 3D function that describes the full scene, and optimize a neural network to minimize the difference between the true light field and what's de…

If you tried to repro these results (including time & space constraints) using traditional photogrammetry, you would be sorely disappointed. Photogrammetry is great if you have a very solid object that is not shiny or translucent at all. You get a lot of surface color micro-detail and a bit of bumpy meso-detail. But, if something is fuzzy, hairy, or lacey or smokey you are straight-up out of luck. Don't even try. If…

That's more interesting than I realized. In this example, I assumed that the model was generating some sort of 3D mesh representing the woman. Is that not at all the case? Would this technique be unable to generate a model or volumetric information despite being able to reasonably render her from many directions?

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#158

Post by asvitkine »

krapp wrote: post #99
dexter89_kp3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving car companies are already working on this. Check out: https://waymo.com/research/block-nerf/ NERF is a very active research area, and the progress from 2020 to now has been nothing sort of astonishing. In 5 years, I expect there to be fully generative NERF's in research i.e describe a scene, and a NN produces a full 3d scene that can you interact with.

Can it be done with Google's existing Street View data?

In the demo video, they mention that they used a lot of footage from self-driving cars to produce that.

One thing I noticed is there are no pedestrians and cars in those scenes. So they must do a lot of work to filter them out by combining a lot of footage. Therefore, it likely can't be used (as-is) on the street view dataset...

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#159

Post by spyder »

There is an explosion of NeRF papers:

https://github.com/yenchenlin/awesome-NeRF

It's possible to capture video / movement to into NeRFs, possible to animate, relight, compose multiple NeRF scenes, and a lot of papers are about making faster more efficient and higher quality NeRF. Looks very promising.

Re: Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes

#160

Post by justinclift »

asiachick wrote: post #119
chrstphrknwtn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut reaction to 'recreating loved ones in VR' is that it would be torturous more than soothing. Once a person dies, they're gone. The world is different, and nothing will bring them back. Spending time with a simulacrum isn't really spending time with a loved one.

That might be true for you but lots of people imagine talking to dead loved ones and imagine the responses and advice they'd give. Some of them do that reflection in front of a picture of their dead loved one. Seeing them in VR would just be an enhancement. No need to hate on it.

Heh, that could then be a vector for manipulation of individuals, through their dead loved ones.

"You know, you should really do XYZ..." (whatever the agenda is)

Pretty dystopian.:(

Post reply on HN