To think that it somewhat represents future direction of Google seems over the top.
Dynamic creation in the way they are hinting at in the description seems like a very difficult but interesting endeavour that requires a lot of iterating to get anywhere on.
This thing could be placed in an art gallery. Visitors submit an original drawing and watch it transform into a cookie cutter contribution, stripping away everything that makes them unique. Its actually a pretty played out concept artistically, the whole “white picket fence” vibe.
and we also have abc.xyz and domains.google and other domain shenanigans that I forget about.
I just learned that alphabet.com is different company. I wonder if they've clung to the domain as tightly as nissan.com has clung to theirs or if google doesn't want it that much.
It was always my impression that coolproject.withgoogle.com is meant to be understood as "company X made a cool project with Google".
The things any number of the projects at indiehackers or product hunt could do with the traffic!
I also like the art in the sense that it allows all kinds of perspectives to flow into the image, and there is a way greater complexity than somebody alone could create. It would be worthwhile to recreate the site - maybe I'll do it some day (-:
This idea could be turned into a phone app, and experimented with real time aspects of drawing concurrently, layers, sounds, video frames. Imagine stitching together a film edited and directed by 50 people in the similar vein as the tiles site. I think we have amazing possibilities and the technology for real time collaboration is here already, we just have to have a different vision than what the big companies want from us.
> the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map.
The added fun of it being dropped, or dropping it? I don't know, since for me on Firefox, it hung at the "finding a place in the world" stage.
I was hoping for something like /r/place.
It's just a demonstration of the impressive but ultimately rather useless "drawing -> shape classification" machine learning application.
It would be massively better if I could just choose from the shape classes and place them myself. That would allow at least for some amount of creativity. Of course then they don't get to show off their gimmick AI...
I didn't say it does. I'm giving an opinion.
> Also, the classification is super useful for technical flowcharts and designs that can be doodled easily. That's at least one use
I disagree. Classic user interfaces are superior here as well. Just pick the tool you want instead of convincing some shape recognition system that whatever you just scribbled is some class of basic shape. You could just pick that shape from a shelf of tools.
Do you really know that for a fact or do you just assume that? What program with a scribbly interface are you actually using on a regular basis?
> I can also use this interface on a tablet.
You can also use toolshelfs (and many other interface elements) on a tablet.
> Many people are wired differently to your preferences, it's worth trying new approaches to old tools.
This is not a new approach, this is a very old approach that has been summarily rejected as a good way of going about things.
Why on earth did you write your post? What does your negativity bring to the world?
In practice though, if somebody wants to deface something, they'll find a way to do it. You can't sacrifice creativity to preventing that.
/r/place has shown that people (or redditors) are cooperative enough to maintain a reasonably "clean" environment, without any form of external moderation.
This is akin to complaining about bugs in a game when they release new artwork. Artists aren't working the bug queue.
This demo site though is more responsive and slick than their mainline product. Just as Gmail it encompasses Web UI, data storage and a machine learning backend. Maybe all people who can code have moved to the doodle lab.