Nvidia’s “Kitchen” Keynote was faked (rendered) and nobody noticed | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia’s “Kitchen” Keynote was faked (rendered) and nobody noticed

blogs.nvidia.com

74 pointsavnigo53 comments

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Clickbait title, it was very clear it was rendered at the time and there was no attempt to hide it.

Indeed, the blog post is referring to this effect: https://youtu.be/KboaLRKbaBU?t=191. Suggesting the entire thing was rendered is very misleading.

There's no way it can mean just that, since that's beyond obviously not real, and not even trying to be?

No one said it was trying to be real except the submitted title.

Oh yeah, I didn't notice. Bizarre submission. (Unless it changed since perhaps?)

Sorry, I can’t seem to edit the title anymore, but I have to say it wasn’t publicized or known at the time that the CEO and kitchen were rendered virtually, including his motions etc. for the 14 second clip. I tried to fit that in the character count of the title because I didn’t think the article title was descriptive enough.

Please flag the post if it doesn’t fit the guidelines, I didn’t mean it to be clickbaity, my apologies.

Why does Nvidia's corporate blog keep referring to itself in the 3rd person? Are corporations just writing their own reviews now?

Maybe they're facilitating people copy and pasting their text?

It’s so it’s easy for jounos to copy paste the press release. You see it a lot with politicians also.

It says in the YouTube video, and shows in the clips that the keynote revealed the rendering immediately as part of the show?

I didn't see the full thing, but the posture and lighting in the clips in the making-of don't look like they'd have convinced anyone? (See YouTube video avnigo links).

Is this just marketing saying water isn't wet or am I missing something?

Seems like the reveal was at the end of the 2021 keynote: https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470

But he was in the kitchen at the beginning of the 2020 keynote: https://youtu.be/bOf2S7OzFEg?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOZ2BSwG4CHmKSVH...

You can spot straight away that he looks like he's in a Zoom meeting with a fake background, he has a green halo behind his hair, and after he says "Our first kitchen keynote." he moves his shoulders and you can see the background behind his shoulders move. (Edit: what the hell, the moving background is visible in the 1080p version, but not really in the 2160p one! So I guess that's YouTube's compressor's fault.)

Since they already built a very detailed model of his kitchen, it would've been more interesting if they had a multi camera setup, or even a camera that moves around, like in the BBC studio https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/olympics/58113457

And the "deepfaked" Jensen seems to me is also very easy to spot...

Or... was he in his real kitchen in 2020, and I'm just seeing things? At the start of his talk in 2021 the kitchen is very out of focus and blurred.

YouTube destroys video quality at 1080p especially if the original file is not "optimal". I spent a week recently testing what combinations of bit rate, resolution, and codec gets the best results at 1080p.

Short version: Upload at 4K, 2mbps x frame rate(30fps x 2mbps = 60mbps), H.265

The kitchen in 2020 was real. The kitchen in 2021 was a combination of real and fake shots, and you can clearly see transitions between them.

> Seems like the reveal was at the end of the 2021 keynote: https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470

The kitchen in the background doesn't match the one being disassembled, you see items in a different place and far less realistic lighting in the 3D modeled one. So I think his background is real/a picture, and then they simply cut to the fake one (the version of the 2021 keynote that I see on YouTube is incredibly blurry even at the highest resolution of 1080p that I can select, so if they deepfaked the speaker, I suspect they were hiding that).

The kitchen isn't fake and who's to say no one noticed? The article certainly doesn't say that, it says that a virtual model was made.. including of the CEO. Maybe I'm being fooled by rendering, but for more than a few minutes he stands slightly out of focus (a risk of IRL video), which doesn't seem like something you'd go to the trouble of rendering (not for a keynote where things should be perfect). Of course, now I've pointed that out maybe future fakers will consider this.

Anyway, back to the kitchen... as they said on "The Wire" follow the spatulas. On camera-left there are red, orange and pink spatulas (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1079), they even move (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=1990).. presumably inconsistency across multiple takes and editing. Also note what's on the counter to his right. At the point they switch to the virtual kitchen (https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470), we get the "unnecessary blurry zoom effect" (used in TV to save interpolation on eg the living room -> house -> city -> country -> planet zoom out).. now the items to his right are different (there was no American flag in that white dish just now) - there's less items, and the spatulas... well even the modellers refused to make so many, dropping the orange, red, and, pink ones from the container.

Direct link to video explanation from article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70

From 23m05s

Is there a turing test for visual reality? This would seem to indicate that in at least some instances that reality is indistinguishable from CG.

I doubt any formal attempt to define such a test exists, given attempts at ultra-realistic painting as an art style predates Turing, let alone computer graphics: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Shishkin_-_Рожь...

That sounds like it could be interesting. It's funny how much of our "reality" / perceived universe is simply imagined or taken for granted even without any CG involved.

Even in simple text, I can relate to you my relief at finding a news article on HN which was posted by my stealth marketing team on behalf of Nvidia today, or I can describe the tiny white kitten curled up on my chest as I type this from the couch I found on the street.

In a way, that expression will create an effect similar to the Nvidia CG project for a lot of people.

Meanwhile, I have no tiny white kitten, I'm not laying on a couch, and I don't work on a stealth marketing team. But some will go as far as visualizing what I must look like, or waxing sentimental about kittens.

Some others would even doubt the retraction of those statements, merely because of a constant inner perceptive mandate which causes them to work extra hard at never getting caught closing off possibilities.

I mean it's not as if the Turing test is immensely complicated. For VR you can just make people compare a rendering with the view of a real camera and see if people can tell the difference.

I showed Netflix's "Love Death + Robots: Ice Age"[1] to several people and no one noticed it's CGI until I pointed it out. Even then I had to point out particular details until they really believed it.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM

Even Topher Grace and the other one? Or just the stuff in the freezer?

All I can find by searching is that this episode was the only one to include live action (IMDb trivia, for example: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9788514/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv) -- what makes you think it's cgi?

Yeah, no, not the parts with Topher and MEW. If that was CGI, then that would be a reality-shattering jump far past the uncanny valley.

There’s a reason they didn’t believe you. I mean there’s obviously parts of that short that did make use of CGI but clearly it’s predominantly live action

Eh? The CGI is in the freezer sure, the man and woman are 100% live action. But who didn't notice that? Or do they think a miniature civilisation actually did exist?

They could have filmed some of the freezer stuff live and then overlayed it on the other stuff

To me that looks exactly how they had done a lot of the freezer stuff. Sure there was some CGI in there too. But most of it looked like classical camera effects (time lapsing, special lenses, etc) rather than computer generated assets.

s/noticed/cared/

Speaking as someone who really doesn't know how long these things take, is this accurate?

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT59YOdch8M

> Typically this type of project would take a team months to complete and weeks to render.

Depending on how many shortcuts you take and how much resources you have, it could.

If it's naïevely rendered, 66 seconds times 30fps is 1800 frames, 10 minutes rendering per frame, 12 days. This scene is very simple, so I think 10 minutes is a bit much, but in any case it's not an unreasonable statement.

(The scene is so simple I feel that with PBR and some fancy postprocessing you could come very close in real time even without their RTX tech.)

Huang is starting to look like Kaku.

I haven't seen this one and while I am sure many have missed, there's no way "nobody noticed". Of course, this is direct PR material straight from Nvidia. Such material is hard for me to read because at 50 percent is junk words and sentences

Agreed in general but imagine a VR video game that looks so good even 20-percent think it's a movie. That's awesome.

Is that just the people with bad eyesight or who are neuro atypical and so can't see the flaws and/or tell from the weird body movements?

What's the closest example in mainstream media of cg human that [almost] passes?

CGI is much more widely used in film than I think you think it is. Half the distance/crowd shots in LotR nearly 20 years ago now were CGI, from what I remember, and e.g. the following scenes of the car sequence in Deadpool use CG humans in far more places than I’d guessed from having watched the film: https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc

The cinematics in videogames likewise can be pretty convincing, even when the gameplay itself isn’t so much.

Edit:

And then there’s AI-generated faces like these: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Princess Leiah was reanimated in star wars sequels. She made it pretty deep into the uncanny valley, and died there.

No digitally rendered realistic human has ever made it through the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is to be avoided at all costs, but many digital animators refuse to learn.

Gollum from LOTR worked well because it didn't matter that he was in the uncanny valley. He's supposed to creep you out, it suited his character.

Leiah (and Tarking) are not good examples.

Blade Runner comes awfully close. Compare the original movie footage with the replicated 3D version and it's almost impossible to tell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQcxEo5MUc8

I'd say, rendering is basically solved. The problem now is animations. Very hard to replicate all micro expressions and imperfections we have come to accept from humans. Even humans with motion capture rigs seem to be insufficient.

That said, what about the John Connor death in Terminator: Dark Fate? What's uncanny about that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49YHDbdRP0A

Behind the scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Rm9k7kTZQ&t=60s

Leia and Moff Tarkin (sp?) were not convincing to me - they're incredible feats, but it just looked like a couple of video game characters stuck in the movie (I'm being a bit harsh there). One shot of Tarkin was pretty great, until he moved.

I'm not at all saying this isn't all incredible progress, but it seems like it's almost asymptotic to creating a convincing on screen effect?

Thanks all for the links and suggestions for scenes to check out.

Uh, Neuro atypical people are much more likely to spot the fake, and are also much more likely to have been doing the modeling and rendering.

Hmm, I would have expected that to be true in one direction from the norm but not the other - how is it that only people in the middle can't spot unnatural motion?

I'd have expected rendering and modelling to attract quite different sets of people.

Half Life Alyx did at some moments feel extremely real to me, it was a weird experience.

If only my Index had a much higher resolution. Alyx felt next level to me even though there was barely any shooting. Just being there felt amazing.

Chasing photorealism in games seems misguided to me; you have to spend much more money on artists. And at the end of the day, photorealism won't make a bad game into a good game; so that money is better spent on other aspects of the game. Furthermore, if you're committed to spending that much money making a game, it will probably have a very conservative lowest-common-denominator design to recoup as much money as possible. Who will take risks and experiment when so much money is on the line? You end up with a game that is mediocre to everybody but exceptional to few. The video game equivalent of a big budget marvel movie.

Photorealism may be a worthwhile goal for VR. Even completely cartoonish games like No Man's Sky can, at times, make you forget what you are seeing is not real. This effect is only enhanced in more 'real' games (like Flight Simulator 2020, in VR).

In general though, I agree it's a waste of time. I'd much rather play Super Hot, for instance.

Although I do play Dwarf Fortress occasionally, so I might not be representative of the average demographic...

> Although I do play Dwarf Fortress occasionally, so I might not be representative of the average demographic...

Based on the current state of games and pay-to-win mechanics I really wish you were, might see an improvement :)

This is a bit of a weird one. Sometimes VR is super obviously rendered in a certain game engine, but sometimes, even on my now aging Vive it just looks absolutely astonishing.

I have a photogrammetry scan of some guys room as my VR home on Steam and it's genuinely eery how I have to do a double take sometimes.

Can this be changed to the original title?

From Our Kitchen to Yours: NVIDIA Omniverse Changes the Way Industries Collaborate

Interesting side effect: I couldn’t help but look at the people in the video and think they were CG as well. Maybe it’s watching it on the phone with less room to tell the details apart.

Not dissimilar to the last broadcasted speech of the queen of England

There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they prefer the company of Canadians.

from the very first keynote in his kitchen i was waiting for it to be rendered there was not a chance jensen would not do that one day :D

one day he will reveal his signature leather jacket was real time raytraced and composited with some futuristic ai as he gave the keynote.

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