Machine learning is an incredibly powerful thing. Damien Henry, a technical program manager at Google, took advantage of this, feeding a machine learning algorithm a single image and asking it to generate an hour-long video of approximately 100,000 frames by predicting the next frame based on the previous one. The result is gorgeous to watch.
Perhaps it's my attachment to the piece of music ("Music for 18 Musicians," a seminal minimalism piece by Steve Reich), but I found watching this to be strangely emotional. I think the beauty comes in that the fleeting tableaus are reminiscent enough of some pastoral to evoke memories of childhood — the imperfect rendering conjures the act of dreaming such things itself — yet at the same time, they are generic enough to be just as much your memory as they are mine. It's also a powerful example of the future; entire scenes replete with detail — clouds, a beach, greenery, and more — appear all from the simple generating image shown below:
It raises interesting questions as well. Will this be a tool to augment photo and video work in the future? Will we able to fill in gaps in scenery with such technology? It's exciting to watch this develop.
[via Gizmodo]
OK, but why is it 240p??
Likely the computational complexity.
That's just wrong.
Kinda like the difference between making love to your wife and phucking a whore. Your wife may be inexperienced and clumsy but she loves you. The whore...not so much.
What the phuck are you talking about?!
A computer being programmed to create a "beautiful" video. I'd always prefer an imperfect video (although a beautiful one would be better), made by a person to something generated by a computer.
That's the kind of thinking that will lead to "virtual" everything and "real" nothing.
"Beautiful" is a bit overstated from my point of view.
That an hour of very boring movie without a story. I also find the 240p a bit weak. It must have taken the 100'000 frames must have taken a couple of seconds to generate at that resolution.
It is truly beautiful. I never could have imagined this whilst banging out BASIC code on my 64 in 1983. Watching this made me feel like I was reliving a summer that I can recall from a long time ago. Interestingly enough, that particular summer was lived in 160x120.
In 1983 I was still using a Sinclair ZX81. The pixels were super blocky, but it only had 1kb memory which wasn't enough to fill the screen with black pixels. The simple for-next-loop programme to put black pixels on the screen would grind to a halt due to the memory being full, well before the screen was filled with black blocks!
So yes, things have certainly come a long way, even if this is only at 240p.
So much crap. So little time.
Hmm, this reminds me of Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar.
Very cool.