ryandamm

Getting the real world onto holographic displays like virtual and augmented reality headsets.

These research directions are all possible foundations for holographic video codecs, basically. Which is exciting!

Why not have a separate chat request to apology-check the responses?

Not my original idea, there was a link from HN where the dev did just that.

Can anyone who has seen these demos confirm if they are 6 DoF (the perspective changes with viewer position) or merely stereo?

The latter is boring and easy to implement, the former much more compelling and technically difficult.

That’s not how parallax works. The wider field of view of the ultra wide camera will show some of the scene that the other camera doesn’t see, but over overlapping parts of the scene the parallax is a strict function of the location of the two lenses’ entrance windows.

It's a market research firm, probably also a hedge fund that takes a short position specifically before posting these articles to make money on a short position. (See also Muddy Waters (https://www.muddywatersresearch.com/).

So yes, it's designed to move the stock market. That doesn't mean it's wrong, though.

The results cited in the article suggest that either the answer is yes, or in fact "marginal students" are perfectly capable students who were being passed over.

The text of the article further suggests that many of the students who scored well on qualifying exams weren't taking the classes because they didn't have the parental involvement or default assumption that they would take it.

(Note that the opt-out group was selected from the general population based on the results of an exam; it wasn't a population-wide opt out. I suspect from your comment you didn't see that?)

Yeah the article is a little muddled; it’s better to understand Anchor as the oldest existing brewery that makes what we think of as craft beer.

When it started there were many small, local brewers making a variety of beers. Prohibition and changing tastes killed off most of the breweries — it helped to be above a certain size so you could profitable brew, say, malted syrups during prohibition. Those that remained after prohibition ended quickly consolidated — that’s how we got the oligopoly off Bud, Miller, and Coors.

Consolidation continues for decades afterwards of course; the brands that got rolled up into the conglomerates included a number of light lager breweries. What distinguishes Anchor from Yuengling and others is Anchor made something other than a light lager — they made steam beer, a warm-fermented lager that has some ale characteristics.

I would categorize it as “proto-craft,” since the real craft movement started in the 80s with Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams; Anchor was an inspiration, a holdover, and an anomaly.

(Most of my sources for this post are Celebrator beer magazine and a series of books I’ve read, but I don’t have them at my fingertips so I may have some specifics slightly wrong here, caveat emptor for reading random internet comments.)

I read an article in a craft brewing mag (might’ve been “Celebrator” circa 2003) that pointed out how the craft brewers association kept revising upward the number of barrels/year production that still qualified as “craft” so that it continued to accommodate Sam Adams.

For the pedantic record, "regulatory capture" typically refers to a situation where an entity responsible for regulating another entity is controlled or influenced by the body it is meant to regulate. Like if the SEC was influenced by Goldman Sachs, or something, or the FDA was influenced by the pharmaceutical companies it was meant to regulate.

Standards bodies are comprised of its member companies, who negotiate (oftentimes quite hard!) with one another over what IP ends up in the standards. They're non-governmental trade organizations (though I suppose with ISO it gets semi-governmental).

Disclosure: I work at Dolby but do not have anything to do with standards. I dabbled in standards bodies at a previous startup but am really not qualified to weigh in on any of this, besides the stray pedantry around language.

This is a very good guess, and I believe it's precisely how it's done. Doing anything diff-ing the color channels still requires a lossy transformation step, so it's not quite as "raw."

And you're right, that treating it as a single monochrome image makes it less compressible, because you get lots of high frequency information between adjacent pixels with different color. Which is sort of the opposite of what you want.

Note also that, despite calling it "raw," Red's implementation is lossily compressed. You can even tune the compression ratio of their "raw" codec, and back in the very early days, there was certain subject matter that just looked terrible coming out of the camera, even as raw -- I remember one particular tree that an early user would film to test new firmware updates; in the earliest firmware builds, it actually crashed the camera (!). The images it did produce showed tons of wavelet compression artifacts.

I think it had more to do with the requirement that three chip camera lenses be telecentric (see my earlier comment). Tends to make worse lenses that are more expensive.

Yeah, they used telecentric lenses; for the prism block to work properly, you have to have each principal ray across the lens perpendicular to the filter. This puts very rough optical constraints on the lens; a typical video camera lens would have dozens of elements arranged in many groups, while an equivalent 'cine' lens might have half or fewer elements.

And on top of that, the lenses produced ugly images. Going to single chip designs was a big upgrade in image quality, mostly for optical reasons.

Yeah this is all accurate... there is a lot of marketing at that company, which is unsurprising given that it was founded by Jim Jannard, who made his money selling consumer fashion goods at Oakley.

But they are collecting royalties from Apple and others...

We actually have had major patent reform! Look into IPR review, the Alice Supreme Court decision, and the patent reform act of ... was it 2012? 2013?

The IP landscape is wildly different than it was when these patents were first filed. That they've held up under scrutiny implies they're not _total_ junk.

Also, it probably still needs reform. But my understanding from talking to lawyers (who I was paying, to be fair), it's better than it was.

I do find myself wondering what fraction of Red's revenue is IP vs camera sales. No particular reason, just curious -- these patents sound rather profitable.

The F900s that Lucas shot Episode 1 on recorded at sub-1080p resolution, _before_ being letterboxed. That was a long time ago.

Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?

I'm not defending their IP practices, but this is not as stupid as it seems. Nikon knew about the patents when they designed their cameras. The patents were not dumb in 2007-2008.

Claims like the one excerpted are part of larger claim sets; if any claim gets invalidated, the rest that rely on it are useless. For the sake of being explicit, but also robust, lawyers will take a technical description and devolve it into a series of nested claims. Those individual claims, in isolation, sound dumb. But they're usually contingent on earlier claims that might reveal the novelty.

(I have not read the patent.)

Well... yeah, that's the crux of it.

But the patented part is treating each channel separately; the actual compression algorithm isn't at issue (which, in Red's case, is JPEG2000).

That said, as soon as you get into colorspace conversions or color sampling conversions (like YUV, etc), you're baking in choices and dealing with quantization and roundoff errors. If you want the most pristine image possible for dealing with it in post, you want the raw photosite information. And if you want that, without deBayering (which introduces those same errors!), you get to pay Red a royalty check.

I don't make the rules, I'm just pointing out what the stakes are here. Yeah, it's pretty fundamental and obvious now, but at the time no one was selling a professional video camera with a single chip for that price. It was a different world.

Again, the patent to compress Bayer pattern data before de-Bayering is the pivotal one. There's a reason Apple is still paying royalties, and it ain't because they don't have good lawyers.

Keep in mind that video cameras of that era were mostly not bayer pattern sensors, at least for professional television cameras. They were three, full raster sensors, typically with an interference-based prism block shunting blue, green, and red light to different sensors. These were so-called "three chip" cameras, the optics of which dates back to analog cameras that used tubes.

Bayer pattern sensors were more common in DSLRs, because they were an extension of 35mm film, and you had to have a single, flat imaging device to work with film optics.

In the film industry, the only digital cameras were the Sony F900 series (iirc) which I believe had the three-chip design, the Thomson Viper (again, memory foggy), and maybe the Panasonic Varicam... I don't know if the Viper or Varicam were single sensor, but they evidently weren't Bayer pattern or didn't compress the Bayer pattern. (I think at least one had RGB stripe layout, which is just inherently inferior.)

So yeah, it's obvious now. But it was patentable then, because nobody (or very few) had ever made a Bayer pattern sensor for a video camera. It's easy to forget how long ago 2007 was, at least until I try to get out of bed in the mornings.

I don't think so -- I think it's a reference to Gollum, the apes in "Planet of the Apes," the de-aged Moss Tarkin (sp?)... basically CG people. That work is almost entirely at the high end, because it takes a lot of digital art work to make them look realistic.

This is moving down market, fwiw, but it's not disrupting traditional moviemaking. It's a fast-growing but tiny niche that I believe will saturate before it comes close to replacing the entire industry. (Full disclosure: I work with cameras professionally, so maybe I'm not an unbiased observer of the industry.)

[ edit for clarity ]

I think this is straightforward technical language being translated into patent language. But you should always read the claims; the language is usually more precise there.

I believe the technique at issue is a way to compress the data -- using standard codecs like JPEG2000 -- without first de-bayering the image. I imagine it was pretty novel when the patent was filed, which would've been the mid '00s. (The Red One used this technique, and it launched in ~2007.)

I haven't pulled the patents, but they probably have to do with compressing the pre-debayered image. Apple sends Red a big check every year for the same patents; I believe they're part of ProRes but not sure.

Essentially, by compressing the raw RGB data coming off the sensor (where each pixel only has R, or G, or B) you avoid the data explosion of interpolating color values at each pixel. It's a technique for compressing raw files, and Red was early to the game.

Perhaps someone on here has more detailed technical info, I haven't actually read the patents, just talked to engineers close to the project.

Do you have any background in movie production? There is more to that industry than VFX tech. Yes, virtual production etc are ascendent, and growing fast -- but most of the production spending is still using fancy optics and traditional production. (And even for virtual production, the actors are still people.) I think this is a typical straight-line projection of the change in the industry that fails to account for the actual underlying dynamics.

But I wish your startup well. I hope you've hired filmmakers, directors, producers so someone on your team understands how movies are made today.

(Plus: there's lots of money to be made in downmarket production. More money is being spent on video production today than ten years ago. The industry is not dying.)

It’s a combination of surface tension and buoyancy; the resulting minimum energy surface can be designed to whatever freeform shape you want by controlling the liquid density and the geometry of the frame.

Can anyone offer insights to how reliable this article is? I don’t know the field and am reduced to looking at superficial signals, like: I see business school bylines and the “see additional publications by this author” links don’t turn up anything… but the Nature imprint seems impressive?

Can anyone weigh in on the methodology or data?

(Interesting to note that the linked page puts this article in something like the 99th percentile for how much it’s tweeted, which I would put squarely in the “reduces my confidence” category…)

In case you're not being facetious: It just means that Color Star's advertisements are no longer visible in the 76ers' arena (because the partnership was terminated).

I'm genuinely not sure whether this statement is pro-crypto or anti-crypto... I assume it's anti- based on the reference to it being better for the planet?

Or is the "designed for hyper consumption" a reference to inflation in fiat currencies? Sorry, perhaps I've confused myself.

Still probably is!