I previously wrote about the Everybody Dance Now technology that allows you to take a video of a source dancer and then apply it to a video of a target person.
Now we have text-to-video technology called DreaMoving. You can start with a reference image, type in a description of the kind of moving you want, and get a generated video clip.
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Just getting to the location of an eclipse is only half the battle. The rest of the trick is the weather; which is often only known 2-3 days before the event. It’s a very good idea to have a changeable fares for air, hotel, and car rentals. For the 2024 eclipse, I needed to switch from Austin, TX to Indiana 2 days before the event. Fortunately I had paid for changeable reservations with became key.
The other part was knowing where to go for accurate data and who to trust. Here’s some of the resources I used:
The most important part was cloud cover. There was a lot of last minute nail biting and plan changes trying to make your bet on where the clouds would split.
Day-of visible live cloud pattern and prediction websites to know where to drive to avoid clouds!
Article Links:
Lanny Smoot is a Disney Research Fellow that is being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Here he is showing off his holo-tile floor that allows multiple people to walk on it in any direction and it automatically keeps you centered on the floor. Definitely something that could be used for VR.
Phoenix Resale interviews lots of gaming business owners. In this episode he interviews Mark from Dynamo Collectables and we get an absolutely fascinating interview of a guy that got out of being a restaurant server and into selling video games. The interview is packed with lots of real numbers and interesting wisdom:
He also talks about the proper attitudes you have to have. You have to mind it like a business first. Running it like a clubhouse for friends to play games with you usually ends with the store closing in a year or two. Focus on customer service and experience – because a lot of other game retailers are bad at. You are not selling games – you’re really selling nostalgia and an experience (which he learned from server background).
He also talks about the time and money requirements. $25k was not enough for them to really start and he didn’t make any money for 4 months. You should know this business is a roller-coaster and constant anxiety is par for the course.
Finally, there is very real personal costs. Without a very understanding wife and family, this would not work. He works 7 days a week and regularly puts in 70 hour weeks with only major holidays off. He has to work conventions and meet with sellers on birthdays and holidays. If he’s not running the store, he’s doing marketing or connecting with people who may need to liquidate an estate sale that day.
In my own opinion, it seems like he’s working an unsustainable pace that he knows will have to end at some point. His hope seems to be to work hard for a decade or two in order to enjoy family and time off later. I think this is a very risky strategy. As old construction workers will tell you – if you’re sacrificing your health now it is unlikely to be there later when you want it.
There are only certain times in your life you can enjoy certain things. I had the energy to do massive road trips and climb mountains as a 20 something. But those activities are much harder on me now. Your kids only grows up once. Once they are adults and move out – you can’t get that time back. Your wife is living her life too – and would like to live it with you. Finally, none of us are guaranteed a long life. You may never reach that goal of retirement. If you’re working yourself dangerously hard, you may find yourself dead of a heart attack due to overwork, an unexpected cancer diagnosis, or even a car accident. Even when pursuing your dreams, you need to make time to live and enjoy what you’re given. Life IS the journies, not the destinations.
- 43.8% of lesbian women and 61.1% of bisexual women have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime, as opposed to 35% of heterosexual women.
- 26% of gay men and 37.3% of bisexual men have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, in comparison to 29% of heterosexual men.
After hearing about a domestic abuse case between two lesbians here in Portland, I had no idea that domestic violence in the LGBTQ community was so high – especially between female couples where the rates are almost double that of straight couples or gay men.
MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia is a tool that came out about 3 years ago and can add animation to static faces in your photos to bring life to them. People first tried it on historical images:
Then it became a trend on TikTok to upload images of relatives that have long since died. While it’s not perfect, it brought many to tears to see their loved ones again.
Of course, this can be a double-edged sword. This technology can bring the past to life, but it can also be used to create fake videos of living people.
Rainbolt is one of the world’s best players of Geoguessr – a game in which you are given a 360 picture and you get about 20 seconds to guess where in the world it was taken. A team at Stanford took 2 months and built an AI that can guess 92% of countries correctly and a median miss error of only 44km – which is astounding.
Here’s a head-to-head competition between the AI Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON) and a pro geogussr player:
But there’s another side of this kind of technology. NPR did an interview and presented a few personal photos to the algorithm. PIGEON was able to guess the location the photo was taken to a really high degree of accuracy. This means you can find places taken in old family snapshots, but it also means that algorithms like this can reveal everywhere you are, and have been, based on your social media posts.
The algorithm that PIGEON uses is an interesting combination of AI model techniques. Besides the AI based learning, they use some interesting methods such as ‘geocells’ that uses political/geographic regions to help narrow locations instead of just naïve squares.
Rainbolt even pointed out that PIGEON picked up on camera lens smudges in the sky that were very common in Canadian google image captures:
There’s so many other details. Definitely check out their paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05845
This is yet another example of where 3 graduate students were able to develop a system that is better than the best experts in the world. And in this case, they did it in less than 3 months with off the shelf software and hardware.
You can only imagine where things will be in just a few years. Anyone that doesn’t think AI is already changing the world is missing it as it’s happening.
EMO is an audio-driven portrait-to-video generation framework. Input a single reference image and the vocal audio, e.g. talking and singing, and generate vocal avatar videos with expressive facial expressions, various head poses. Generate any duration depending on the length of input video.
You can make still images talk, sing, or cross-actor operations in which still images can deliver the performances of other actors or in different languages.
It reminds me of other AI facial animation software like MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia.
Project: https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/
Github: https://github.com/HumanAIGC/EMO
The Paint Explainer runs us through all the different kinds of tricks used by marketing and ad agencies.