41–50 of 91 posts
Look like a great idea and technological advancement, but the biggest thing holding back Google Glass is not that it lacks feature X. Glass will be held back because most people don't want to look like geeks. Meta's next design looks like it's from an 80's Sci-Fi movie. I'm not trying to be an asshole, but there is no way I could take someone seriously wearing those things.
Awesome awesome awesome. I'm super psyched about this stuff. I'm going to pre-order a pair. Anyone (from Meta maybe?) have any details on the SDK? I see "write code in Unity3D on a Windows PC" from their Kickstarter, but curious if that's the latest word...
All Unity 3D. Thanks for the feedback that you want more detail. We're posting some app video and a developer section soon. We make the real world (surfaces/objects/hands) appear as 3D objects inside Unity. We do the heavy lifting with computer vision and math so you can code the game as you would any other--the cool bit is the 3D objects correspond to stuff in the real world. Our number one goal is to be the easiest…
Depending on how you implement your Unity integration it probably wouldn't be very hard to add support for other code bases, but if you want a lot of developers making applications for Meta it seems like you'd have more options available.
When looking at new technologies there are always two questions: is it worth doing and can it be done. The answer to the former is obvious here. I don't know nearly enough about the state of hardware to make a call about the latter, but kudos to the team for unabashedly attacking such a huge problem and trying to make the future happen faster.
Most of what I know about computer vision comes from deep learning approaches, but tracking a white object doesn't seem like it should be too difficult. Is tracking a large white object actually "one of the hardest computer vision challenges", or is this just a garbage quote?
> Tracking blank white objects — be it a piece of paper, or a big blank wall — is one of the hardest computer vision challenges around. Most of what I know about computer vision comes from deep learning approaches, but tracking a white object doesn't seem like it should be too difficult. Is tracking a large white object actually "one of the hardest computer vision challenges", or is this just a garbage quote?
But all in all, I wouldn't say it is. In undergrad the final project of my computer vision class was to track a soccer ball over video frames. White circular object against mostly green backdrop- fairly straightforward.
> Tracking blank white objects — be it a piece of paper, or a big blank wall — is one of the hardest computer vision challenges around. Most of what I know about computer vision comes from deep learning approaches, but tracking a white object doesn't seem like it should be too difficult. Is tracking a large white object actually "one of the hardest computer vision challenges", or is this just a garbage quote?
A way to get around that is to use an infrared setup like the kinect to project a pattern onto object, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work if both the projector and the object are moving.
> Tracking blank white objects — be it a piece of paper, or a big blank wall — is one of the hardest computer vision challenges around. Most of what I know about computer vision comes from deep learning approaches, but tracking a white object doesn't seem like it should be too difficult. Is tracking a large white object actually "one of the hardest computer vision challenges", or is this just a garbage quote?
It depends - tracking a white piece of paper on a snowy backdrop is definitely a hard challenge ;) But all in all, I wouldn't say it is. In undergrad the final project of my computer vision class was to track a soccer ball over video frames. White circular object against mostly green backdrop- fairly straightforward.
Did anyone see actual demos of this thing in action? Meron came to my computer vision class this spring at CU and didn't have anything to show other than the CGI demo that has been up for over a year. The newer videos are also mostly just renderings and the only working examples that were posted are around 10 seconds long. I wish them the best of luck but it seems to me like they're really overselling themselves.
Wow, didn't realize Meta was a YC company. It's a very interesting product. I watched the demo on Kickstarter. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something seemed off about the object occlusion. Was that FX or real tech?
I get the feeling that reality will not come close to the video. I'd love to be wrong, but this is usually the case with entirely CGI promo videos...
> Tracking blank white objects — be it a piece of paper, or a big blank wall — is one of the hardest computer vision challenges around. Most of what I know about computer vision comes from deep learning approaches, but tracking a white object doesn't seem like it should be too difficult. Is tracking a large white object actually "one of the hardest computer vision challenges", or is this just a garbage quote?
However, tracking a white object such as a piece of paper sitting on a contrasting desk is relatively easy. Especially if your algorithm is designed to handle such a case. You have the easily detectable corners and edges of the paper, and from that you can infer its transformation. You can also detect its soft deformation (such as bending or crumpling the paper) if your system is assuming a piece of paper as the model.
The way some tracking works is to use a corner detector to find "interesting" features. A naive tracking algorithm will then examine the spatial neighbourhood of each feature in the next frame in order to find out where it has moved to.
There are better feature representations (such as SIFT) which define a "feature" in an image in such a way as to be scale and rotation invariant (you can match the feature against scaled and transformed versions of itself). There are also much better ways to track across frames of video data.
Given that Meta has infrared and RGB stereo cameras it has a lot more information to work with. I hope they can make it work well under all situations, but I am skeptical.