Video: New tool animates Web photos, might raise privacy concerns
Researchers at the University of Washington have found a way to take hundreds or thousands of digital photos and create an animation of a person’s face or body in mere seconds. The application can make a person appear to age quickly, or change their expression from say, happy to sad. Basically making a movie from static images of a face.
“I have 10,000 photos of my 5-year-old son, taken over every possible expression,” said co-researcher Steve Seitz, a University of Washington professor of computer science, in a press release. “I would like to visualize how he changes over time, be able to see all the expressions he makes, be able to see him in 3-D or animate him from the photos.”
This project is producing a very cool new tool. But it might also tap into serious privacy concerns. One can imagine, for example, being able to animate images from Facebook since photos are auto-tagged with people’s names. Just yesterday a German regulator asked Facebook to disable this new photo-tagging software , over concerns that its facial recognition feature is an unauthorized collection of data on individuals, and may violate a user’s privacy. Suggested automatic tagging, as it’s called, scans through a user’s photos and finds similar features to those portraits already uploaded and tagged. According to the New York Times , Facebook has already built an archive of more than 75 billion photos, and 450 million people have been tagged worldwide.
Consider another potentially contentious scenario: A future where a digital you is persuading the real you; where a communicating and animated clone could become a new advertising medium. Studies out of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab have proven a digital you can profoundly influence our decisions and behavior. The work is premised on the fact that we tend to be influenced by those who are similar to us, and nothing is more similar than the actual us. It’s not hard to imagine the leap to advertising where suddenly you aren’t just seeing any old stranger drinking a Coke but that ads tailored to you have “You” drinking that Coke.
The face animation project is funded by Google, Microsoft, Adobe and the National Science Foundation. It follows from another breakthrough four years ago where University of Washington researchers found a way to automatically stitch together photos of buildings taken by hundreds of tourists to recreate a 360 degree view, in near 3D, of say something like the Sistine Chapel . That work became Microsoft’s striking Photosynth tool, which launched to standing applause at a TED conference back in 2007. (See video here.
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We feel the ghost of the machines at all times, as the moviemakers struggle to attain the highest level of human realism transplanted onto our evolutionary ancestors. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is like an old-fashioned B-movie with a handsome star,
"It was solid filmmaking, but I don't need to see it again a lot of times." However, at least one UFO researcher thinks the film's so-called "inaccuracies" could have a devastating impact on future Earth-ET relations. Alfred Webre is a Vancouver-based
At each location along the crawl, you will have to play a game symbolizing a “new death” from the movie! Along with the crawl, get a load of Warner Bros. Pictures slew of new images from New Line Cinema's horror film FINAL DESTINATION 5.
According to a Vancouver restaurant manager Jan Wichmann, the British stud usually dined at the eatery during the filming of “New Moon” alongside the other cast members. Like most people, Rob also enjoys a nice time to unwind after a hard day's work.
But 17 years later, her fight has been renewed in Vancouver by two groups challenging the Criminal Code offence of helping in a suicide. The BC Civil Liberties Association, acting on behalf of a Kelowna woman with ALS, is asking that the offence,
King of California | JoelCrary.com: Movie Reviews by Vancouver ...
(Mike Cahill, 2007)
August 3, 2011
by Joel Crary
If there’s any treasure buried in California, chances are it’s long been paved over. That’s what “King of California” presupposes. It adds the funny idea that such treasure would be buried under, say, a Costco, and features an off-the-wall third act in which treasure hunters break into said Costco and jackhammer away at the floor underneath a skid of bulk foodstuffs to get at it. Back in college, I bought my first television set at a Costco along with boxes of chocolate bars and more than what would constitute a sane amount of mustard. Those places have everything.
The movie is an idea in search of a plot. Writer/director Mike Cahill tacks one in place: he makes his treasure hunter a negligent father named Charlie (Michael Douglas), freshly released from a mental hospital. Charlie’s 16-year-old daughter Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) has been living alone in their house for a time, paying the bills with a job at McDonald’s, unaware that she’s on a third mortgage. She’s gotten away with this by convincing all concerned potential guardians that she’s living with someone else.
We learn via flashbacks that Charlie was the kind of dad who would outfit Miranda’s science projects with political statements. His wife was a hand model who clenched her bags in her childlike grip and took off, leaving Miranda to be raised in Charlie’s glorified jazz hall of a California suburban home. “He pawned his bass and vowed never to pawn it again once he got it back,” she explains. An old friend from the band (Willis Burks II) shows up with an instrument in one hand and a joint in the other, quietly desperate to keep old times alive. “I don’t do that anymore,” Charlie says, having moved on to Spanish lessons and the finer points of metal detector tones.
It’s unclear where Charlie’s craziness begins and ends. Once he’s sprung from the sanitarium, he shows signs that he hasn’t fully recovered. From what, exactly? One flashback shows him swinging violently by the neck from a chandelier, his daughter coming to his rescue with a butcher knife. “Time to ride the bipolar pony,” Miranda intones sarcastically in voiceover. It gradually comes to light that whilst in the sanitarium, Charlie discovered the approximate whereabouts of a nearby treasure left behind by a fictional explorer named Father Juan Florismarte Torres. Now free, he obsesses over his GPS and wanders the grounds of a local Applebee’s with lunatic intent.
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