The Clicking Sound Of The Rack Is Oddly Satisfying.

Interactive Example Based Terrain Authoring with Conditional Adversarial Networks

Graphics research from LIRIS, Purdue University and Ubisoft is method of generating 3D landscape terrain from simple pen markings with the assistance of neural networks:

Authoring virtual terrains presents a challenge and there is a strong need for authoring tools able to create realistic terrains with simple user-inputs and with high user control. We propose an example-based authoring pipeline that uses a set of terrain synthesizers dedicated to specific tasks. Each terrain synthesizer is a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network trained by using real-world terrains and their sketched counterparts. The training sets are built automatically with a view that the terrain synthesizers learn the generation from features that are easy to sketch. During the authoring process, the artist first creates a rough sketch of the main terrain features, such as rivers, valleys and ridges, and the algorithm automatically synthesizes a terrain corresponding to the sketch using the learned features of the training samples. Moreover, an erosion synthesizer can also generate terrain evolution by erosion at a very low computational cost. Our framework allows for an easy terrain authoring and provides a high level of realism for a minimum sketch cost. We show various examples of terrain synthesis created by experienced as well as inexperienced users who are able to design a vast variety of complex terrains in a very short time. 

Link

Monster Feels. GIF Painting by Sarah Zucker, 2017.

Oh, Snap! Scientists Are Turning People's Food Photos Into Recipes

Researchers have created an artificial neural network that analyzes an image of a dish and tells you how to make it. Still in the early stages, the technology might help improve our dietary health.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are creating a computer system modeled after the human brain to examine photos of food on social media and break them down into recipes.

Machine Learning and Big Data Know it Wasn’t You Who Just Swiped Your Credit Card

by Jungwoo Ryoo, The Conversation

You’re sitting at home minding your own business when you get a call from your credit card’s fraud detection unit asking if you’ve just made a purchase at a department store in your city. It wasn’t you who bought expensive electronics using your credit card – in fact, it’s been in your pocket all afternoon. So how did the bank know to flag this single purchase as most likely fraudulent?

继续阅读

Holo Messenger

Developer Abhishek Singh is creating an AR recorded video messaging app with iOS ARKit that is presented in classic Sci-Fi settings (and all the recording is done with a single normal camera):

Remember Princess Leia’s classic holographic message from Star Wars? Well I built this app using ARKit and some awesome tech from Aifi.io that allows you to record and send your own. If you want to know when it becomes available, head over here: http://bit.ly/holomsngr

Link

First underwater entanglement could lead to unhackable comms: A team of Chinese researchers has, for the first time, transmitted quantum entangled particles of light through water – the first step in using lasers to send underwater messages that are impossible to intercept. http://ift.tt/2vnLups

Clara Mae’s brilliant thoughts on race, gender, and AI in film

How to Safely Watch the Aug. 21 Solar Eclipse

On Aug. 21, 2017, a solar eclipse will be visible in North America. Throughout the continent, the Moon will cover part – or all – of the Sun’s super-bright face for part of the day.

Since it’s never safe to look at the partially eclipsed or uneclipsed Sun, everyone who plans to watch the eclipse needs a plan to watch it safely. One of the easiest ways to watch an eclipse is solar viewing glasses – but there are a few things to check to make sure your glasses are safe:

 Glasses should have an ISO 12312-2 certification

They should also have the manufacturer’s name and address, and you can check if the manufacturer has been verified by the American Astronomical Society

Make sure they have no scratches or damage

To use solar viewing glasses, make sure you put them on before looking up at the Sun, and look away before you remove them. Proper solar viewing glasses are extremely dark, and the landscape around you will be totally black when you put them on – all you should see is the Sun (and maybe some types of extremely bright lights if you have them nearby).

Never use solar viewing glasses while looking through a telescope, binoculars, camera viewfinder, or any other optical device. The concentrated solar rays will damage the filter and enter your eyes, causing serious injury. But you can use solar viewing glasses on top of your regular eyeglasses, if you use them!

If you don’t have solar viewing glasses, there are still ways to watch, like making your own pinhole projector. You can make a handheld box projector with just a few simple supplies – or simply hold any object with a small hole (like a piece of cardstock with a pinhole, or even a colander) above a piece of paper on the ground to project tiny images of the Sun.

Of course, you can also watch the entire eclipse online with us. Tune into nasa.gov/eclipselive starting at noon ET on Aug. 21! 

For people in the path of totality, there will be a few brief moments when it is safe to look directly at the eclipse. Only once the Moon has completely covered the Sun and there is no light shining through is it safe to look at the eclipse. Make sure you put your eclipse glasses back on or return to indirect viewing before the first flash of sunlight appears around the Moon’s edge.

You can look up the length of the total eclipse in your area to help you set a time for the appropriate length of time. Remember – this only applies to people within the path of totality.

Everyone else will need to use eclipse glasses or indirect viewing throughout the entire eclipse!

Photographing the Eclipse

Whether you’re an amateur photographer or a selfie master, try out these tips for photographing the eclipse.  

#1 — Safety first: Make sure you have the required solar filter to protect your camera.

#2 — Any camera is a good camera, whether it’s a high-end DSLR or a camera phone – a good eye and vision for the image you want to create is most important.

#3 — Look up, down, and all around. As the Moon slips in front of the Sun, the landscape will be bathed in long shadows, creating eerie lighting across the landscape. Light filtering through the overlapping leaves of trees, which creates natural pinholes, will also project mini eclipse replicas on the ground. Everywhere you can point your camera can yield exceptional imagery, so be sure to compose some wide-angle photos that can capture your eclipse experience.

#4 — Practice: Be sure you know the capabilities of your camera before Eclipse Day. Most cameras, and even many camera phones, have adjustable exposures, which can help you darken or lighten your image during the tricky eclipse lighting. Make sure you know how to manually focus the camera for crisp shots.

#5 —Upload your eclipse images to NASA’s Eclipse Flickr Gallery and relive the eclipse through other peoples’ images.

Learn all about the Aug. 21 eclipse at eclipse2017.nasa.gov, and follow @NASASun on Twitter and NASA Sun Science on Facebook for more. Watch the eclipse through the eyes of NASA at nasa.gov/eclipselive starting at 12 PM ET on Aug. 21.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

komorebi

Design project by Leslie Nooteboom is a lamp that can project artificial natural lighting onto walls, created with high-rise apartment spaces in mind:

komorebi is sunlight filtering through leaves, creating a dance of light and shadows where filtered sunrays hit a surface. It is the reflections on pavements underneath centuries-old trees on a sunny day, and moving, framed lightboxes through windows of homes onto walls. However, these days buildings are taller than they have ever been, creating a place to live for as many people as possible on the tiniest piece of land possible. Homes become a place of isolation from the outside – windows are absent or so tiny that even the idea of nature disappears, and lighting has become so artificial that there is no sense of day, time or place anymore.

komorebi lets you curate natural lighting experiences indoors.

In a time where indoor sunlight is becoming more scarce, the need for technological nature is increasing. With an ever growing global population and urbanisation levels reaching huge rates, fewer living spaces are able to receive direct sunlight. There are attempts at solving this issue, however these are very static. Intensity and colour seem to be the only way in which their light is dynamic.

You can find out more at Creative Applications here or the project page here

Steven Universe Theory: How The Gem’s function

In this theory I am going to attempt to explain how the Gems of Steven Universe could potentially function in real life. This theory is based on a relatively superficial understanding of things like Quantum physics, so a more knowledgeable person in such fields would likely be able to tear this theory a new one. In fact I encourage such critiques, as I find debates like this rather entertaining.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s try to answer how, with my woefully rudimentary understanding of quantum physics, that The Gems could potentially function in real life.  

First we need to answer, what are the Gems? In the internet short called Classroom Gems, Pearl explains that Gems project hard light structures from their gems that comprise of their physical form from their gems. These Gems contain all of what they are, and their body is, as Steven puts it, “just an illusion.”

An illusion with Mass.

Is the concept of Hard Light possible? Actually yes, and in fact we’ve reputedly already made headway in this department. Princeton University has reported that they have begun Crystallizing Light. 

How have they achieved such a thing you ask? Well what they did was they created a super conductive structure where the billions of atoms inside of it worked in tandem to create what they call an “artificial atom.” Photons that come in contact with this superconductive artificial atom take on the properties of said atoms, and they begin to interact with each other like particles. These photons, now entangled together like particles, began behaving like the states of matter, assuming qualities of liquids and crystallized solids.

In these experiments at Princeton, they reported that they were able to make light slosh about in a contained area like a liquid, and they were able to “freeze” this light into a Solid as well, all thanks to this superconducting “artificial atom” structure.

So we know now that there are potentially circumstances in which light photons can be made to behave like particles, thus creating hard light structures that are entirely malleable and able to shift between liquid and solid states very easily (assuming all this data is viable and laudable of course.) This sounds eerily similar to the Gem’s “physical” bodies. Much like with the results of these experiments, they are able to alter their physical forms at will, and as solids they behave just like regular physical bodies, if not much more durable.

So this begs the question, could a Gem potentially function as a superconductor?

A Superconductor is what is known as a Macroscopic Quantum effect, or something in quantum physics that is observable in large scale, as supposed to the atomic scale that quantum effects are normally associated with. A material becomes a superconductor when it reaches a temperature that allows energy to have zero resistance while traveling through the object. Normally an object’s conductivity is subject to resistance, which will cause the energy traveling through the object to be expelled via heat. This is why batteries run out of power when you put them inside something, because that energy is eventually expelled out of the wires via heat instead of continuing to circulate in the circuitry. In a Superconductor, the energy never leaves the circuitry and continues the circuit indefinitely until it no longer has its super conductive properties. 

This is consistent with Gems in Steven Universe, as all the energy they will ever need is inside their gems. While real life super conductors require intensely cold (or hot) temperatures in order to achieve this quantum state of conductivity, the Gems themselves appear to be a highly sought after theoretical state simply referred to as a “room temperature superconductor.”

  A room temperature superconductive material would change the world of technology forever. Extremely advanced technology that is theoretically possible, but require an intense amount of energy with conventionally conductive materials, would be able to achieve the same effects with a room temperature superconductor with very little or no energy loss. As long as the equilibrium of Superconductivity is maintained, anything that utilized such materials would be able to function indefinitely.

This as well is consistent with Gems from Steven Universe. While each gem has variations on how much power they can exert at a given time, as long as they maintain within their boundaries and limitations, their gem forms will hold and sustain themselves for thousands of years with no sign of deterioration. This would also explain why maintaining larger hard light bodies than their Gems are equipped for is taxing for them. By pushing themselves beyond their equilibrium, they are losing their superconductivity and are losing energy from their gems via heat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0Mm7bI1SIM

 When a gem is poofed, they retreat inside of their gems restore the equilibrium that superconductivity offers before reforming their bodies.

Can a Gem behave as a Superconductor? Gems, Diamonds and the like are composed of Carbon. Carbon can most definitely be used as a superconductor, especially as shown with experiments with a substance called Graphene. 

Graphene is essentially a 2 dimensional diamond, a lattice of carbon a single atom thick that is intensely durable (many times stronger than steel) and is a step in the direction of finding that coveted room temperature superconductor. Part of the process that takes place in the Kindergartens therefore, is changing the gem from a conventionally conductive substance to a room temperature super conductor, and feeding the energy that is drained from around them into the gem so it can achieve equilibrium inside of it and they can pop out fully formed. 

This would also explain why better formed gems like The Era 1′s are able to create things like Gem Weapons, while Era 2′s can’t even shapeshift. Gems like Garnet have energy to spare, so they can use it to create other hard light structures besides their bodies without affecting their equilibrium, while a gem like Peridot cannot afford such exertion. 

So far we’ve explained that, theoretically speaking, the Gems are a room temperature superconductive structure made of carbon, which house within them an equilibrium of energy that can be used to manipulate photons into behaving like particles, which they use to comprise their physical forms. Next is to explain where the intelligence and personality comes from. This is decidedly easier to explain.  The Gems are artificial intelligence.

 Each atom inside of this room-temperature superconductive gem is a transistor, the thing that sends those 1′s and 0′s that are the building blocks of any and all computer programs and languages. We already have single atom transistors, so applying them in an intricate structure in the form of a seemingly ordinary gemstone is both plausible and practical. In fact we are currently working on a device that uses graphene (that afore mentioned 2 dimensional diamond) that uses light instead of electricity to compute things. In the lattice of graphene there is a single atom which operates as an “optical switch” 

Or a switch that can be flipped on an off at the speed of a photon.  To put it in more simplistic terms: Its a computer that does its computing at the speed of light and is woven together at the atomic level, not with visible circuit boards. The kind of processing power such a structure would have would definitely allow for an artificial intelligence comparable with or even significantly smarter than the average human. 

So to recap: A Gem from Steven Universe, in real life, would theoretically be an Artificial intelligence, programmed into an atomic, superconductive-supercomputer (which computes at the speed of a photon/light) made of a type of carbon, has an equilibrium of light based energy within itself that won’t deplete as long as they stay within their boundaries of how hard they can exert themselves, and can manipulate photons into behaving like particles which comprise their physical forms.