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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

>If you’re more interested in how this impacts you, just know this: whether you want to convert “decades-old family photos” to 3D, or you want to convert your professional portraits into 3D-like creations, FB now lets you do that. You just need to upload it using the Facebook app on “an iPhone 7 or higher, or any recent midrange or better Android device.”

...aaaand that's the motivation for this feature - persuading people to upload more photos to Facebook.

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> ...aaaand that's the motivation for this feature

5 imaginary dollars says it's just something their AI team built and thought was cool so they rolled it out.

Wouldn't there need to be some business motivation to push that all the way through QA and localization and all the other steps before it hits production?

The business interest could be attracting talent by advertising their technologically interesting projects in the news

Call me silly but I am extremely certain Facebook is not exactly struggling to attract tech talent to the point that they'd build, test and deploy non-trivial features just to do so.

Maybe the reason they're not struggling now is because they already have a history of doing things like this.

Or maybe it's being one of the biggest companies in the industry and having hundreds of billions of dollars to throw behind compensation and other perks.

Nah, you're right, they put entire teams to work building and maintaining user-facing features so they can add a couple thousand more applicants to the hundreds of thousands they already get.

That's also true of, for example, SAP, Oracle, Accenture, etc., but would you say they have the same chance at attracting talent as Facebook?

Zuck having an interest in 3D shit should do it

Why would it need an "iPhone 7 or above" when the depth map is calculated on FB's servers?

lol, you say this like it's a revelation. Why would a company build a feature in their product and not expect people to use their product to use the feature.

There's a significant difference between "this works for all your current pictures on Facebook" and "you need to choose to upload some specific pictures on this specific app to use this feature".

The latter will get you a far better information on what people want to see turned into 3D.

The text is ambiguous, but I would interpret it as "Photos need to be on Facebook to do this, so those not already on[...]" rather than "This works only on Photos newly uploaded".

Why would they need to restrict the feature to new photos only to get that information? They could just use telemetry and see what photos people pick if they wanted to.

Like pytorch?

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