Month: August 2017

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Remedy, the developer behind the likes of Alan Wake and Quantum Break, has teamed up with GPU-maker Nvidia to streamline one of the more costly parts of modern games development: motion capture and animation. As showcased at Siggraph, by using a deep learning neural network—run on Nvidia's costly eight-GPU DGX-1 server, naturally—Remedy was able to feed in videos of actors performing lines, from which the network generated surprisingly sophisticated 3D facial animation. This, according Remedy and Nvidia, removes the hours of "labour-intensive data conversion and touch-ups" that are typically associated with traditional motion capture animation.

Aside from cost, facial animation, even when motion captured, rarely reaches the same level of fidelity as other animation. That odd, lifeless look seen in even the biggest of blockbuster games is often down to the limits of facial animation. Nvidia and Remedy believe its neural network solution is capable of producing results as good, if not better than that produced by traditional techniques. It's even possible to skip the video altogether and feed the neural network a mere audio clip, from which it's able to produce an animation based on prior results.

The neural network is first fed a "high-end production facial capture pipeline based on multi-view stereo tracking and artist-enhanced animations," which essentially means feeding it information on prior animations Remedy has created. The network is said to require only five to 10 minutes of footage before it's able to produce animations based on simple monocular video capture of actors. Compared to results from state-of-the-art monocular and real-time facial capture techniques, the fully automated neural network produces eerily good results, with far less input required from animators.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Note 8 press image. Check out those cameras! (credit: Evan Blass)

Behold—above is the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 revealed in all its glory. The pictures come courtesy of VentureBeat's Evan Blass, who has proven reliable when it comes to these early press render leaks.

After the massive redesign of the Galaxy S8, it's no surprise that the Note 8 follows in its footsteps. You're still getting a slim bezel design with rounded display corners and on-screen buttons. The top sensor arrangement seems to be identical to the Galaxy S8, with an iris scanner setup consisting of one extra camera and one infrared LED, along with the usual front-facing photo camera and sensor setup. The sides are still rounded on the front and back, and there still looks to be an extra physical "Bixby button" which exists for the sole purpose of launching Samsung's new voice assistant.

The major difference over the S8 is that the whole device is squarer. The taller corners will no doubt be used to store the S-Pen, the Galaxy Note's signature feature. On the back we also see Samsung's first dual-camera arrangement, which, rumor has it, is for a 3x optical zoom setup.

Enlarge / A concept render of what an edge-to-edge iPhone 8 might look like. No space for a fingerprint sensor, thus the need for another type of biometric login... (credit: Veniamin Geskin)

A new phone icon, presumably of the D22 iPhone, discovered in the firmware.

Whether intentionally or not, it seems Apple pushed out an early version of the HomePod's firmware. The HomePod will apparently run a version of iOS 11 when it's released this December, and thus the code contains mentions of other Apple devices that will also support iOS 11.

In this case, the HomePod firmware includes two new code names: D22 and PearlID, which developers Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo believe to be the code names for the next iPhone and the new facial recognition tech respectively. Additionally, the firmware contains dozens of strings and function names that are clearly connected to some kind of front-facing infrared face analysis tech: BKFaceDetectStateInfo, mouthFrown_L, com.apple.power.camera.frontInfrared.activeDuration, etc.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Stars like the Sun brighten over the course of their history, a trend that has significant consequences for the habitability of Earth and other bodies both in our Solar System and beyond. An icy world on the far edge of the habitable zone may turn into a temperate paradise given enough time.

Or, it could go straight to being a Venus-style hell if a new study turns out to be right. The study's authors tuned a full-planet climate model loose on a planet covered in ice. The find that, under a level of incoming light that's sufficient to melt the ice, the planet reaches a greenhouse state that would cause it to lose all its water to space and possibly head straight into a runaway greenhouse.

The only thing that saved Earth from a runaway greenhouse is, ironically, the presence of greenhouse gasses in its atmosphere.