Interactive Dynamic Video

I recently got access to some hailed MIT technology with its own shiny videos, professional photos, patent pending and slick copy. It turned out to be a barely working prototype built on standard technology.

To me misleading the public is not the worst about it. Pretending scientific accomplishments can deter and demotivate other, 'competing' scientists in the field.

Besides sounding bitter and petty, this comment is bizarre — the relevant papers are available right on the site (http://www.interactivedynamicvideo.com/publications.html).

We should encourage people to make their research accessible to a broader audience, not engage in catty sniping and whinging when they get recognized for their work.

Can't edit the comment so I'll just put this here: didn't expect this to get upvoted to be honest ;) I was trying to be bitter and petty as a kind of dark humour, but for the record I actually think it's pretty cool that students at MIT have that kind of support behind them.

That said, it's always sort of amusing to see the MIT PR-machine at work, because it's so _obvious_ once you get familiar with how they work. At most universities the idea of hiring someone to make a professional animation with perfect sound-studio recorded narrative for a single project/paper would just... not happen. On the other hand I can see why they do it, because it works.. it really changes how people perceive the work, and the importance of it. On the other hand, yes, it can be a little frustrating to see something sort of publicized as completely game-changing as if the work came leaped forth from the vacuum of space and directly into the minds of MIT graduate students, when plenty of other people at other universities are doing related work. (How many citations does the video have, for example?) Not saying that's the case here, but I'll admit that it's sometimes been how I've initially reacted to things from MIT that were closer to my research domain. Kind of like, "hey that's pretty similar to what I'm doing, how come I don't have a dedicated web page and professional video and thousands of hits coming from the top of hacker news and reddit?" And then it hits me: "oh right, because I didn't make one.."

tldr; MIT has PR down to a science. They take publicity seriously, and it makes a huge difference for them. That is not necessarily a bad thing, although it does raise the bar for everyone else, which can be kind of annoying when you have papers and theses to write.

I should also mention that the people at MIT CSAIL news are very good. They put a lot more attention into fact checking and making sure things are accurate than your average reporter. They set a pretty good example.

To the advantage of being at MIT, they are very good about preparing a press release and contacting other news outlets to get exposure. But as a broader point, when it comes to reporting on science, I think the MIT/CSAIL set a good example.

Funny comment. :)

But actually this is unlikely to make a big difference on battery drain. Pokemon GO appears to be built on Unity and Unity is pretty notorious for having poor battery management. Whether you're pegging CPU or not, Unity burns lots of power. So, the incremental battery life hit is likely to be low in doing image processing on top of a frame.