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Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

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Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#81

Post by jcims »

TacoSteemers wrote: post #70
neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

I have similar problems with Zoom. The mute/unmute changes position and can be hidden in a top bar that slides out. In some fullscreen situations there is no button to get out of fullscreen. Sometimes double-click works, sometimes it doesn't. Recently I could not even alt-tab away, basically my computer got 'locked' by zoom. https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-10-16-ux-anti-pattern...

I imagine most know this by now but the space bar works as a push to talk button in Zoom (as long as it has focus of course).

I really think there is a market for a physical video conference controller. If I could get a hefty slab of something with quality buttons to enable/disable video, push to talk/mute/unmute, bring to foreground, ‘on air’ light and end call, I’d easily pay $100 for it.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#82

Post by jvdvegt »

loosescrews wrote: post #48
deelowe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using meet, teams and zoom on high latency and/or low bandwidth connections.

Meet seems to work better on poor connections, but it does it with a significantly more CPU intensive codec (VP9?). As a result, it only seems to work well if you have a powerful CPU. If you have a weak CPU, Zoom seems to work much better.

On my 2010 Macbook Pro, Meet uses about half the CPU resources as Zoom. Also, audio-lag is much worse in Zoom.

Background blur doesn't seem available in Firefox on Ubuntu unfortunately :(

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#83

Post by Jyaif »

mft_ wrote: post #77

As an aside, this example looks faked: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-viEA4OY0sxA/X5s7IBwoXOI/AAAAAAAAG... As in, the blurred background looks totally different (light:dark, shapes, etc.) to the unblurred background. (I get that they’d need to do something funky to show blurred and unblurred backgrounds with the same foreground video, and faking it is likely easier than doing it programmatically, but this is just odd/slo…

The fact that you think that the blurred background example is fake is a testament to how well background replacement work.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#84

Post by Spare_account »

adrr wrote: post #75
neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

It’s even worse on touch devices. You have to touch the bottom screen to get the controls to appear. Accident touch twice in the wrong location and you can hang up.

I've often thought that on a touch screen device the OS should ignore touches on buttons/popups that have been on screen for less time than a human could reasonably have observed it and chosen to interact with it. If I touch the screen 0.05 seconds after a button appears, I was probably _not_ aiming for that button.

In fact, now I think about it, this has happened many times over the years with traditional mouse drive interfaces too.

I'm sure some power users would like to shorten the 'reaction time delay' or even remove it entirely so I guess that should be an option as well.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#85

Post by kosinus »

oars wrote: post #71
tobr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes, of course. D as in mute.

M is taken by minimise, hence the next closest thing is D (for deaf).

But ⌘D is also 'add bookmark' on Mac, at least. So depending on which UI element inside Chrome is focussed, it may not do what you want either.

I've been using this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-push-t...

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#86

Post by mhh__ »

systemvoltage wrote: post #44
neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

Isn't this sort of a Fizz Buzz for a UX/UI design professional? I don't mean to demean anyone, but I see this sort of a thing literally everywhere. Hiding important and absolutely crucial information (that can make or break your product) in the name of minimalism. Coming out of a company that has one of the highest hiring bars for software engineering, and yet, their products have such an awful UX/UI. This isn't an e…

From their UI to their branding to their customer services (For cloud at least), google really does seem a bit autistic as a company.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#87

Post by germandude123 »

mft_ wrote: post #77

As an aside, this example looks faked: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-viEA4OY0sxA/X5s7IBwoXOI/AAAAAAAAG... As in, the blurred background looks totally different (light:dark, shapes, etc.) to the unblurred background. (I get that they’d need to do something funky to show blurred and unblurred backgrounds with the same foreground video, and faking it is likely easier than doing it programmatically, but this is just odd/slo…

The left clip is an example of background blur.

The right clip is an example of background replacement.

This is why the blurred background on the left does not look anything like the unblurred background on the right.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#88

Post by _pastel »

samtheprogram wrote: post #4
jtokoph wrote: post #3

The example video clips in the post look nothing like me and my team's view when using the new feature. Most of the time half of our hair gets blurred or replaced and hand gestures will cause either our hands or head to disappear.

I can vouch for this. I haven’t really needed the background blur feature personally, but I’ve tried it and both myself, colleagues, and friends — pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that has used it — loathe Google Meet’s background blur, and prefer Zoom’s by far. In my experience, it doesn’t completely cover the background most of the time, and if you move at all, as you point out, it can’t keep up. Kind of funny t…

"Half baked" misrepresents the difficulty this task. Yes, Zoom does it better, but it's _still_ an excellent and interesting engineering accomplishment.

I've always wondered what proportion of modern real-time video effects rely on ML vs. classical image processing; this not only answers that question, but provides details down to the level of model architecture and the final latency and IOU benchmarks.

Of course I'd be more interested to read how Zoom manages to do even better, but I'm not holding my breath for them to publish those details.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#89

Post by randomsearch »

oars wrote: post #71
tobr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes, of course. D as in mute.

M is taken by minimise, hence the next closest thing is D (for deaf).

Would it be less arbitrary to add another modifier to the shortcut, rather than use "D"?

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#90

Post by mr_mitm »

TacoSteemers wrote: post #70
neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

I have similar problems with Zoom. The mute/unmute changes position and can be hidden in a top bar that slides out. In some fullscreen situations there is no button to get out of fullscreen. Sometimes double-click works, sometimes it doesn't. Recently I could not even alt-tab away, basically my computer got 'locked' by zoom. https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-10-16-ux-anti-pattern...

Zoom does this well on the iOS app. They call it "safe driving mode" [1] and half your screen essentially becomes the must/unmute button. You can either tap it or swipe left to unmute.

[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362973-What-Is-...

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