abedavis

No worries. I totally understand (and invite) the skepticism. It's good to question this kind of press when you see it, and try to understand where the technology really is. I just think it's important not to assume that anything presented with polish has to be compromising on content.

Hey, first author here. Good questions.

The simulation runs in realtime, and is interactive. Generating the simulation can take a while though.

The 5 second video took about a minute to process on my laptop. But longer videos, and higher-resolution videos, can take much longer. For instance, we've used the technique on high speed video to recover audible vibration modes, and this can take hours to process because the video itself is so big.

I wrote the processing code in Matlab, and the simulation in c++ and GLSL. The simulation is pretty well engineered because I wanted it to run in realtime. I didn't put a lot of time or effort into optimizing the video analysis part though, so it probably could be made faster.

A big part of it is that measuring the vibrations of large structures, like buildings or bridges, can be inconvenient and expensive. There are limited cases where you can measure new stuff with video simply because you don't have to touch the object or shine a laser at it, but the big win is that by making vibration measurement cheap and simple/convenient, it means you can do a lot more of it. We can start taking more measurements on more structures, which will tell us where we should put resources to rebuild infrastructure.

It might also make quality assurance/ product testing cheaper but that's less save-the-world :-p

Thanks so much! I really appreciate that :) And, in fact, I'm not at all upset about the original comment - I totally get where the skepticism comes from. Polish and substance are too often uncorrelated when it comes to science in the media. I think it's important not to assume they are anti-correlated though, because then we start discouraging scientists from trying to reach people beyond the academic community.

I should also mention that the people at MIT CSAIL news are very good. They put a lot more attention into fact checking and making sure things are accurate than your average reporter. They set a pretty good example.

To the advantage of being at MIT, they are very good about preparing a press release and contacting other news outlets to get exposure. But as a broader point, when it comes to reporting on science, I think the MIT/CSAIL set a good example.

I am a grad student. If you consider how many hours I work, I probably make less than minimum wage.

I am also the first author of the paper described in these videos, which my colleagues and I published in the top academic journal in our field.

I also made all of the videos, did the voiceovers, and hand drew the animations (though I'm flattered you think they were professionally done). I wrote and presented the TED talk. I purchased the dedicated host name for a single algorithm (using money from my own grad student stipend no less) and created the webpage myself.

I am an academic first, and I take academic integrity very seriously. I also take education very seriously. I consider educating the public about research to be part of my job, and this is done best when people are excited about the research.

Also, this work IS exciting. If it weren't we wouldn't have spent so much time working on it and it wouldn't have been published in ACM TOG. But back to flashy videos and press...

Consider that in the past three days, nearly 100,000 people (and counting) sat through a video where I explain what vibration modes are. VIBRATION MODES. They may have been lured in by pokemon, but kids who remember that video won't have to ask their physics teachers "but why should I care about this? what is it useful for?" Hell, if it gets people excited I hope teachers show it to their students before they teach the topic. I'm not making money off of these videos, I'm just stoked this many people are getting excited about research. Our paper has 17 numbered equations in it - it's not exactly a page turner.

When scientists don't make an effort to communicate their work to the public, that responsibility falls on people outside of the academic community - people who often don't understand the work. When we make things harder for the press, we only encourage them to bastardize the work to make it more palatable to the general public. By taking an active role in how we present academic work to general audiences, we can better shape the message, manage expectations, and help prevent content from being sacrificed for click-bait.

Ok, I'm going to get off my soap box now. Cheers! -Abe Davis

The camera used in most of these experiments (a Phantom high speed camera) doesn't even have a microphone - so that would be quite impossible.

Hi guys, I'm a PhD student at MIT and I turned my research into a free iOS app called Caperture. I hope some of you will like it. Cheers!