Author: navin

Ambient Presence

Venkat at RibbonFarm talks about ambient presence a concept that was new to me:

Let’s say you and your spouse work in different cities. You both sign up for a VoIP service like Skype, but instead of dutifully talking every evening, you just turn up the speakers on your respective computers, and leave the Skype connection on. You occasionally say something to each other; you can hear each other’s TVs and kitchen noises. That’s ambient presence. Communication technology becoming so cheap that you can afford to leave it on to create a passive background connection. It is a pretty darn cool concept, so let’s take a serious look at it.

See full article.

This seems to me like a rather powerful idea. Some people are already using this in the IM/chat context. Keeping an IM window open and randomly throwing out a few lines every once in a while is something people have started doing more and more. But if we could extend this to other media (like phones) that could change how we communicate with certain people.

Convert your photos into 3D models

Make-3D is a service out of Stanford that allows you to upload any photo and it converts it into a 3D movie (or more generally, a 3D model that you can explore if you have the appropriate browser plugin). I uploaded this photo:

and a few minutes later, I was the proud owner of this:

This is how it works:

Our software uses a breakthrough technology in machine learning. It estimates depths from the single image by using our monocular vision algorithm, developed in 2005. It captures a variety of monocular cues and learns the relations between different parts of the image using a machine learning technique called Markov Random Field (MRF). Our algorithm first divides the image into small patches and analyzes them at multiple scales to estimate each of the patches’ 3-d location and 3-d orientation. More details could be found here.

The smarter ones amongst you would have realized that what the above means is that the program is pretty much guessing. And it can make mistakes. For example, I uploaded this photo:

and ended up with this 3-D model:

As you can see, the algorithm seems to have put a huge hole in the tower, and Ronak appears to be doing more of a Spiderman routine than regular rappelling.

By the way, the site is very easy to use. Try it yourself.