This girl isn’t real, and it’s proof that CGI isn’t creepy anymore
CGI is moving fast, very fast. Not just for added effects in movies, but also for creating completely lifelike 3D models.
The biggest problem facing the animation community is an effect called the ‘uncanny valley’. We’re confronted with this when we see something that looks nearly human, but just not quite.
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Humans are so good at recognizing other humans, that’s it’s extremely hard to create a thing that looks like a normal, healthy person and not a zombie or a corpse.
It’s explained in the graph below:
We’ve become pretty good at making CGI look like it’s almost real, but the real challenge is making it seem like its normal.
Japanese artists Teruyuki Ishikawa & Yuka Ishikawa — otherwise known as Telyuka — started a project in 2015 to create an extremely realistic computer-generated schoolgirl. Her name is Saya, and she has been improved on since then.
This is the 2016 version (click to enlarge):
And these are some pictures of the 2015 version (again, click to enlarge):
Even her shoes look incredibly realistic:
Take a close look at all of these pictures. How do they make you feel? Personally, I’m not sensing the uncanny valley — it just looks real.
Everything from her hair to the texture of her skin doesn’t make me feel like it’s not a real person. If I would’ve come across the image without knowing the context, I’d probably think nothing special of it.
With it becoming increasingly harder to differentiate between real and fake humans, weird things start to happen. For example, take a look at the Instagram account of lilmiquela. When she popped up on the social network a few months ago, people couldn’t figure out if she was real or not.
The illusion lasted for a while, until she posted a video of herself which was obviously fake.
However, it goes to show the line is definitely blurring — it makes me think about the future, where there might be serious confusion to see if you’re dealing with a real person or a computer-generated version of one.
What do you think? Did we destroy the uncanny valley, or is there still something off about most animated figures? Let us know in the comments.
from The Next Web http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2016/09/09/cgi-girl-isnt-real/
Jony Ive is a man who has, almost literally, designed himself out of existence.
When Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, proudly took the stage this week to call the iPhone 7 the best phone that Apple has ever made, he led with a customary handoff to a Jonathan Ive video. You know, the ones where Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, seems to talk in slow-motion about how very, very carefully designed the newest Apple wares are. It’s as if to say: Listen to every word twice, people! Because you can’t even come close to doing anything like this.
Fair enough. There is no company in the world that can design and engineer a smartphone the way Apple does. There is no other company in the world that can bend the globe’s supply chains around its most exacting whim, and no other company that can afford such extreme care in designing even the smallest details. Truly, Apple is the greatest force in industrial design that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes.
Therein lies the strange contradiction at the heart of Ive’s accomplishments—seven generations of iPhone, and dozens more iPads, iMacs, MacBooks, and the Apple Watch. Literally, trillions of dollars in merchandise. But in the age of the smartphone, there is very little industrial design left for us to get excited about. The smartphone itself is rapidly approaching its platonic form: A single, monolithic sheet of glass that simply delivers all the content you want, whenever you want it. No matter how powerful smartphones become, they simply aren’t capable of wowing us any more as a pure design object, because what the screen is mounted on matters so much less than what plays across it.
That’s what I was thinking, when Jony Ive intoned his customary voiceover as the video played of the iPhone 7’s sumptuously lit curves. Ive usually appears looking wide-eyed and a little stunned in those videos. This time, he didn’t appear at all. It was just his voice. Ive floated above the latest iPhone announcement like a ghost.
When I think of the things that still truly have the capability of delivering a holy shit moment in technology, none of them have much to do with hardware—and they don’t have a ton to do with designing pixels either. So while Ive is the soft-spoken guru of all design at Apple, including its software, all that "design" seems like window dressing on the great leaps in user experience that seem just over the horizon. Think of massively linked datasets on user behavior, which allow your phone to guess what you want to do, when you want to do. Think of digital assistants able to parse even the vaguest commands and parcel out all the sub tasks to the right app—"Hey, can you make a reservation at one of my favorite restaurants this Friday, and make sure that my best friends get the invite too?"
These things are invisible. We can’t hold them, and the sense in which they are "designed" will be vastly different from any piece of hardware we have today, or even any piece of software, no matter how beautiful. Which makes for an interesting capstone to Ive’s career: He ushered in the great renaissance of computer hardware design and even ascended to overseeing Apple’s software. But he has also accelerated the sidelining of both. The next great design monuments won’t be easily displayed in a design museum. They’ll instead be the systems and incentives that dissolve all the messiness of our whims into that simple bit of feedback that happens when your smartphone listens to whatever convoluted thing you’re asking about, and simply says, "Okay."
from WebdesignerNews https://www.fastcodesign.com/3063532/has-jonathan-ive-designed-himself-out-of-existence
Good morning. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is giving awaythe proprietary database that it guarded closely for many years as a valuable tool for assessing the risk of securities, a sign of how the business model of the tech sector is migrating into new markets along with software itself. “It’s the content, tools and analytics we’ve been working on for decades, and we’re putting it in the hands of clients,” Goldman CIO R. Martin Chavez told the WSJ’s Justin Baer. Under his guidance, Goldman has adopted many emerging technologies such as containers, which make it more efficient to run software.
Giving away software is a familiar concept in the world of tech startups, and has migrated into traditional tech companies such as Microsoft Corp. too. The idea is to establish a standard, and then sell products on that platform, and it has worked, but with varying degrees of success. For small tech startups looking to go public or be acquired, making a profit wasn’t always a top priority, although the latest generation of startups is putting more emphasis on profit, some investors say.
It’s still tricky for tech companies to make the business model work, but refinements are underway, Jake Flomenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners, said at a meeting with Work-Bench, an enterprise VC fund and start-up workspace. Nonetheless giving away software, which may also include providing users the ability to modify it in a practice known as open source, is here to stay. Platforms are the path to the ultimate goal of pleasing the customer. Says Mr. Flomenberg: “There is a massive shift going on in the ways technology is bought.” Does free software play a big role in your technology? Let us know.
Mitsubishi Motors names first global CIO. Masao Kuruma, who has worked in a variety of senior technology posts at Sony Corp. since 1983, will help the company revamp its enterprise resource planning and transition to a new information system, the company said.
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Microsoft working on Slack competitor. A Microsoft news blog reports that the company is developing a competitor to Slack, the popular group messaging and collaboration tool. MSPoweruser reports that the application, called Skype Teams, will offer a similar user experience and many of the same features as Slack, including channels, but it will also include threaded conversations and Office 365 integration. MSPoweruser reports that Microsoft plans to first release Skype Teams to Office 365 subscribers.
Companies remain wary of U.S.-EU pact. Multinational companies remain wary of the Privacy Shield data-transfer agreement between the U.S. and the European Union according to a recent survey of 600 privacy professionals. Only 34% say they plan to use the agreement, the WSJ’s Dana Heide reports. The European Commission says 103 companies have been certified under Privacy Shield since the U.S. Commerce Department began accepting applications Aug. 1. By comparison, more than 4,000 firms had been certified under an earlier agreement, known as Safe Harbor, before it was invalidated by the European Court of Justice last year.
Using technology to protect from mass shootings. As the start of school brings renewed focus on mass shootings, the WSJ’s Christopher Mims reports on new devices and systems aimed at locking down classrooms and keeping kids and teachers safe.
How Snowden escaped. With Oliver Stone’s upcoming film Snowden Movie set to renew conversation on Edward Snowden’s role in the ongoing debate over privacy and possible government overreach, the National Post looks at the two weeks in 2013 Mr. Snowden spent in hiding in a Hong Kong slum after first leaking classified documents stolen from the National Security Agency.
Amazon cooks up London food delivery. Amazon.com Inc. is trying out meal deliveries from certain London restaurants, in a move to gain share in a burgeoning marketplace for chef-made food at home, Reuters reports. To customers with its Prime delivery service, meals over about $20 will be free.
Ireland tests transparency as appeal of Apple ruling looms. The Irish government has taken several steps to be more transparent about its arrangements with foreign companies operating on its soil, the WSJ’s Stu Woo reports. Its parliament is expected to overwhelmingly approve an appeal of the EU’s decision on the Apple Inc. tax-recoupment case with wide cross-party support. Attached, however, is an order for an independent review of the country’s corporate-tax system.
New malware targets Android banking apps. Cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky Lab said they have discovered a new type of malicious software that circumvents security features on version 6 of the Android mobile-phone operating system, allowing criminals to infiltrate banking apps and steal credit-card details, the Journal’s Robin Sidel writes.
Mergers streamlined by new back-office tech. As companies become more dependent on complex software systems to manage their businesses, smoothly combining different platforms is becoming a bigger factor in a merger’s success. CFO Journal’s Vipal Monga reports that new software systems for accounting, inventory tracking and supply-chain management are helping companies combine operations faster by automating some of the grunt work that previously was done manually.
U.S. personnel management hack preventable, congressional probe finds. A congressional report released today recommends that the federal government make an effort to hold on to qualified chief information officers and incorporate a “zero trust model” with stricter controls on user access to data, Reuters reports. The report also blames a lax security culture at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for contributing to factors that led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to more than 22 million people.
Volkswagen is exploring a joint venture to make electric cars in China with a state-run company as part of its aggressive push into electric-vehicle production. (WSJ)
Tom Loftus contributed to this article. The Morning Download comes from the editors of CIO Journal and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking http://on.wsj.com/TheMorningDownloadSignup.
from CIO Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/09/07/the-morning-download-once-secretive-goldman-sachs-gives-away-database/?mod=WSJBlog
There was a time when I viewed designers with the same scepticism as I viewed homeopathy.
When I pictured designers I thought of Mad Men, the creative department sitting around smoke-filled rooms waiting for inspiration to strike. But slowly and surely, I’ve realised great products are built by designers and engineers working together.
Most of the time, people tell us this is achieved by designers learning to code, or engineers learning interaction design. Ironically, great products aren’t built by engineers becoming better designers, or vice-versa. It happens when we’re able to balance the competing forces in both design and engineering, and prevent excess or deficiency from occurring. Achieving the golden mean, as Aristotle once said.
The right balance of design and engineering
As a company grows, it’s easy for the yin and yang of design and engineering to quickly get out of whack. Engineers are, in their hearts, architects. The first thing they want to do is build and ship the latest features, or increase performance, whether or not the customer has asked for it.
Likewise, when design is prioritized over functionality, we’re left with products more akin to pieces of art. As Don Norman argues, many of today’s products have reinforced the idea “that the designer’s sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions.”
Balancing interests between engineering and design in a growing product team is easier said than done. Most assume it comes down to compromise. But balance really comes when both sides pursue their self-interest.
This is already well understood in economics, what Adam Smith calls “the invisible hand”. We witness the same dynamic in product teams. If designers and engineers were to compromise at every stage of building product, we’d likely never experience the technical breakthrough and a never-before-seen design great products require.
Continual compromise will guide you to nowhere but mediocrity.
Let’s take a real example. We recently launched OAuth to allow people to authorize third party access to their Intercom data. From an engineering perspective, we were focusing on the functional and technical side of the implementation. At no point had we prioritized user flows, menu layouts or feature descriptions. Meanwhile, our designer was focusing on creating the best possible user flow, not simply one that that followed the technical steps the engineers had in mind.
This self-interest didn’t mean selfishness. Through our daily stand-ups and whiteboard sessions, we were constantly interacting with one another, and debating how a particular piece of design or engineering could add value to the product. Far from being a sign of internal strife, it was actually a sign of the health of our product team. If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
Achieving your own golden mean
Aristotle, the invisible hand…how the hell does this help me create a better product!? Here’s how.
Engineers can’t wear a designer’s hat
Forget the hype about unicorns, it’s simply unrealistic to expect engineers to also design the product they are building. Engineers can’t simply forget the embedded and detailed knowledge they’ve built up of a product, and at the same time think about it from the perspective of a customer trying to use it for the first time. Designers are also trained to catch the tiniest interaction details most wouldn’t ever notice. Engineers don’t miss these details on purpose – it’s just not a priority for them like basic functionality and deploying bug-free code are.
Engineers need to know designers are people too
When engineers work with designers on a daily basis, it quickly becomes clear that 217 options on a dropdown menu don’t actually help the customer make a decision. That’s why the best product teams have their designers operate in a ‘hub and spoke’ model – embedded in a product team alongside engineers, but still reporting to a central design team. This ensures the designers can remain true to the wider design principles of the company, while also interacting with engineers on a daily basis.
Accept there are some things you can’t control
Putting designers and engineers on the same team is only the first step. You will need to trust that they find their own balance. You will not be able control how, when or if this interaction occurs. That feeling you have, that you need to put some rules or structures in place to get both sides working together, well, you need to let it go. Rely on the people you hire, trust their instincts to pursue their own self-interest to realize a better product for your customer. It’s a little scary, but the invisible hand is the best way guide them to the golden mean of engineering and design.
For great products to be built, both design and engineering need to be in balance. If you have a super strong engineering team but a weak or underserved design team, you will struggle. If you have built a talented design team, but don’t have a functioning engineering team, you will struggle. The scales don’t need to be set at all times, but I can’t think of any successful product where one overwhelmed the other.
More importantly, you need a set of designers and engineers who are willing to stand up for what they believe is the best solution, and be willing to work together to achieve these breakthroughs. Continual compromise will guide you to nowhere but mediocrity.
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.intercom.io%2Fgolden-mean-design-engineering%2F
“Framer is a really powerful tool that can prototype anything you can think of but if you take a look at Framer’s Gallery you’ll quickly notice something:
Out of their 54 examples, 48 of them are apps, 4 for Apple Watch, 1 for iPad and 1 for Apple TV. Is Framer even meant for ‘traditional’ web/desktop design?”
Well, would you look at that? September has well and truly kicked off and Autumn seems to be rearing it’s sleepy, little head – which means it’s time for our monthly round-up of the best UX content that August had to offer. The following is a collection of the most popular articles from our social media community, as well as a couple of our own personal favourites. Any you think we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments or shoot us a tweet @usabilla.
Historically, emotion has been thought of as a byproduct of design; not something that drives the user experience. But emotion is actually a critical new dimension in UI, and one for which designers are ultimately responsible. Check out Huge’s chat with Sherine Kazim to find out more about how emotive UI can change the way we design.
It’s hardly hyperbole to say that forms are the lifeblood of digital information sharing. However, their functionality is more often working ‘well enough’ but not exactly well. Read on to discover UX Booth’s take on the modern techniques which are allowing designers to produce faster, easier, and more productive form experiences.
With the introduction of Windows 10, Microsoft’s classic ‘My Computer’ icon evolved into ‘This PC’, prompting many designers to reassess their use of perspective. In this Medium piece, John Saito takes an interesting dive into why some interfaces refer to either the user’s or the product’s point of view. For example, is it ‘My Account’ or ‘Your Account’?
Alex Kreger relays the story of his friend Steve, who switched banks as a result of bad UX. He then goes on to investigate why so many banks are losing customers because of outdated design and unintuitive navigation. Read on and see if you can relate.
In this insightful Medium article, Dan Crisan rounds up 11 top ways to improve your design skills. From sources of inspiration to software to download, with a few Pokemon references in between, there’s a useful takeaway for every reader.
The secret to success with any business lies in a positive user experience; your target audience simply won’t interact with your brand if they don’t enjoy doing so. And what’s the best way to achieve a great UX? By actively listening to your users and implementing a user feedback solution on your website, app, or other communication channels.
As mobile screen real estate balloons with each new release of a larger device, designers must consider the real world implications and adjust their designs accordingly. It’s all about that perfect mix of creativity and usability. Check out these top three mobile trends that have taken on this challenge in the recent app market.
And there we have it. That concludes our round-up of the best UX articles of August 2016; which one was your favorite?
Go on an amazing virtual road trip in the area of Los Santos, fantasy city looking like Los Angeles. The multidisciplinary creative director Sean Pruen regularly captures wonderful pictures in the game. Admire these pictures is a way, whenever you are a gamer or not, to pay tribute to video games developers who are constantly improving their art. Have a look at his tumblr to discover new landscapes.
from Fubiz http://www.fubiz.net/en/2016/09/02/gorgeous-pictures-of-grand-theft-auto-5/
For about three years now, telemetry has been gathered for professional basketball games in the US by SportVU for the NBA. Six cameras track the on-court position of the players and the ball, with a resolution of 25 samples per second.
James Curley used the same data and extended those scripts to animate NBA plays, such as this basket scored during a December 2015 game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Timberwolves. The orange polygon is a measure of player spacing on the court. (Pop a taut rubber band around the players and let go: that’s a convex hull.) It would be interesting to extract the area of this convex hull over time as a series, and see if the value relates to scoring opportunities, but that’s a task for another time.
James used simple ggplot2 functions to plot the positions of the players and the ball on top of a geom extension to draw the court. Each frame was animated from records in the SportVU data, and then assempled into an animated GIF using the gg_animate function. (Many thanks to James for providing the GIF itself.) You can see further details, including the complete R code, at the blog post linked below.
One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. – Nathan Bateman in Ex Machina
Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a $15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human.
Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database. The tech giant recently bought a leading artificial-intelligence research outlet, and it already has a robotics company on its books. So what if Google, or Facebook, or any of the companies we entrust our information to, wanted to use our search histories to create an artificially intelligent robot?
Another conference. “Great.”
This one’s different, trust us. Our new event for New York is focused on quality, not quantity.
In Ex Machine, Nathan uses Blue Book’s search-engine index (i.e. a massive vault of information about every search query and user data) to create the backbone for his AI robot.
Around the same time (late 2015), Google announced the existence of RankBrain, an artificial intelligence system, which (as of 2015) is processing “a very large share” of “never before seen” search queries made on Google’s various properties.
Think of Google’s algorithm as a machine trying hard to think like a human, using every possible piece of data – social, user generated, browser footprint, click patterns – at its disposal to match individual searchers to the best answers to their questions.
According to Google, “if RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”
If you want to get geeky, RankBrain converts the textual contents of search queries into “word vectors,” also known as “distributed representations,” each of which has a unique coordinate address in mathematical space. Vectors close to each other in this space correspond to linguistic similarity.
In more plain English, when people search query – aka a keyword – that’s never been made before, RankBrain attempts to map this query to words – or “entities” (clusters of words) – that have the best chance of matching it. RankBrain attempts to guess what people really mean when they make queries over time, records the results, and adapts results to provide what it sees as better user satisfaction.
Think beyond keywords
RankBrain — plus the more than 600 changes that Google makes to its algorithms each year — is forcing marketers to get much smarter about the content they create and the way they optimize it.
To thrive in this new, machine-mediated world, marketers must think beyond keywords—the traditional building blocks of SEO. They must understand the context in which queries are made. They must create content that provides a satisfying answer that contributes to the perfect, meritocratic library of the world’s information that Google is trying to build.
Here’s what Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, had to say about the impact of Google’s RankBrain on marketing in 2016:
RankBrain is a big change for Google internally, but for marketers, this is a continuation of the advanced query parsing and interpretation that Google’s been doing since Hummingbird (and even before). It continues the pattern of Google getting better at identifying the intent behind search queries and serving up content that satisfies that intent rather than just the content that best matches the searcher’s precise keywords. That’s not to say that keyword research and targeting don’t matter — they absolutely still do. It’s more that, when you intelligently target a set of concepts or topics that searchers need, Google will automatically help you rank for a wider variety of phrases that searchers use to access that information.
Credit: Rand Fishkin, Moz’s Whiteboard Friday
Rankbrain looks for patterns between searches that may seem unconnected at first, but in fact are similar and fit together. In my recent post on The Next Web, 7 Google changes that will make or break your SEO, Sam Hurley of Otmim – Eyez brought up a hypothetical example of how RankBrain’s advanced query matching might look like in practice.
The keyword ‘gimme pizza close’ currently returns results for a kids’ TV show. What if all of a sudden, there was an influx of searchers entering this query (for example, due to a marketing stimulus) who wanted takeaway pizza close to their home? RankBrain would measure user behavior, learn from data and alter the results to show just that.
According to a recent post on Search Engine Journal, the biggest difference between the pre-and-post RankBrain universe is that “you can start thinking beyond single keyword phrase optimization.” This sentiment seems to ubiquities in SEO circles.
Rand Fishkin, who recently launched the new Keyword Explorer tool at Moz, explains how the evolution of keyword research affects marketing strategies in practice:
The one thing RankBrain does change (or, more accurately, *kills*) is the need for individual pages targeting multiple, slightly-unique permutations of a keyword term or phrase. E.g. you no longer need four pages targeting 1) kids clothing, 2) childrens clothing, 3) clothes for kids, 4) clothes for children. Google knows all of those mean the same thing, and they return almost exactly the same results for all four, so you’re better off creating one page that serves that intent rather than four different ones.
Death of content for SEO: Long live content for humans!
In his recent takedown of tech culture, Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Startup Bubble, Dan Lyons writes about blogging purely for SEO optimization — basically, great content that is devoid of value but stuffed full of buzzwords to fool Google’s search algorithm.
It’s a funny and probably overblown passage, but it raises a serious point for content marketers; in the past, they’ve had to write around keywords, often at the expense of creating content and telling stories people want to read. The introduction of Google’s Rankbrain could put an end to all this, once and for all.
With it’s honed ability to collect and interpret massive user data from Google.com, Chrome, and Android, Google now allows readers to give feedback — in the form of bounce-backs, click patterns, pogosticking, and click-through-rates — on whether your content piece actually does what it promised to do.
So if you wrote a compelling, educational piece, including a lot of research and diligence, you’re in the clear; but if you wrote a piece that didn’t provide enough value, you could easily lose the top spot if enough readers felt like you were wasting their time.
Evolve or perish
A few caveats — while it has been reported that Rankbrain is now the third most important signal for ranking, there are hundreds of other factors that Google uses to rank webpages. So while its introduction last year and continued refinement is certainly important, it’s not the end of SEO as you know it.
In light of RankBrain’s increased influence on Google search results, marketers need to redefine the strategies to craft their winning SEO playbook for 2016.
Ultimately, Rankbrain could be a win for both content creators and consumers, worn out by clicking on links looking for information and finding only a soup of keywords. It’ll force marketers to be smart, but a rising tide of good content will likely lift all boats.
from The Next Web http://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2016/09/02/machine-learning-just-got-more-human-with-googles-rankbrain/
