[HN Gopher] Infinite Nature: Perpetual View Generation of Natura...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Infinite Nature: Perpetual View Generation of Natural Scenes from a
       Single Image
        
       Author : romaintailhurat
       Score  : 125 points
       Date   : 2021-03-20 09:08 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (infinite-nature.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (infinite-nature.github.io)
        
       | yowlingcat wrote:
       | Wow. Every day, we get closer to the eponymous electric dreams of
       | androids. Personally, I can't wait to use something like this in
       | a music video.
        
         | 127 wrote:
         | There's already a service for that https://wzrd.ai/
        
           | yowlingcat wrote:
           | Well, I'll be. Combine that with green-screen technology, and
           | I don't really have any excuse to not record myself and set
           | myself to video for my favorite compositions. Thanks for
           | putting this on my radar, friend.
        
       | fab1an wrote:
       | Really cool. One thing the most boring part of my mind is
       | wondering about when seeing these is related to the legality of
       | stuff like that: many of the drone videos this is trained on are
       | obviously copyrighted, and the system has used them to learn how
       | to come up with novel ones. The same applies to GPT-n, which is
       | trained on massive amounts of copyrighted material, no? Does
       | anyone know anything about this; there must be a couple of
       | dissertations on this topic by now?
        
         | mpoteat wrote:
         | A much more salient and important point is generative models
         | relationship to music. Right now, covers are legally protected
         | as derivative works. I predict commercial usage of generative
         | music to avoid royalties within the next decade.
         | 
         | Philosophically, I think that the process of learning - whether
         | by a human or simulacrom - should be protected. That is, if I
         | write a book, I don't need to seek the permission or pay the
         | authors of every book I've ever read. To me, this is the only
         | sane result for a non-dualist materialist who believes neural
         | networks are in principle isomorphic to human minds.
         | 
         | As a matter of law, I believe it will have to be determined on
         | the case law level some point. I'm not a lawyer and this is not
         | legal advice.
        
       | rajveermalviya wrote:
       | Wow.
       | 
       | I am guessing this will be used in Google Maps Street View?
        
         | lupire wrote:
         | Why? Maps has actual data to show. Fake data isn't needed or
         | helpful.
        
       | crispyambulance wrote:
       | Wow, these images are very dreamlike and not just from the flying
       | POV.
       | 
       | There's something fascinating about the familiar but nonsensical
       | details. Who says a CPU can't go on an acid trip?
        
         | mistercow wrote:
         | I think the fact that it has short-term but not long-term
         | temporal coherence is part of what gives it that surreal
         | quality. A range of any five frames looks like a plausible view
         | shift, but over longer timeframes, it looks like details are
         | appearing out of the horizon. Still really cool though.
        
         | h0l0cube wrote:
         | > familiar and nonsensical
         | 
         | You might like this analysis of the phenomena
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F7XBwFwA-M&vl=en
        
       | behnamoh wrote:
       | This has huge applications in video games! I can't wait for game
       | developers to implement a truly infinite world with this.
        
         | pbhjpbhj wrote:
         | For what sort of games?
         | 
         | There's a few ways I see procedural generation as worse than
         | limited [human] curated modelling - you lose the very careful
         | balance, the iterated architecting to enhance game play, you
         | also lose the commonality of experience across players, and if
         | the game is often played you lose an aspect of the player's
         | ability to become expert at the game.
         | 
         | It's natural that game companies will use lots of procedural/ML
         | generation of game aspects; but it's probably going to be "if
         | you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
         | 
         | Television had a certain manner of aiding societal cohesion
         | when we only had a few channels (3 when I was little). That
         | meant lots of commonality of experience. It seems [some] games
         | could go the same way - players getting such vast differences
         | of experience that we lose some of that shared experience that
         | binds people together.
         | 
         | Ultimately, a future of us all living in our own entirely
         | unique VR realty seems like some version of hell.
        
       | gamer9 wrote:
       | looks amazing, can be very useful for procedure generated game
       | world.
        
       | dwighttk wrote:
       | Wow. Huge step forward from competitors and also wow there's a
       | lot more to do.
        
       | nmca wrote:
       | Lots of issues with long-term consistency in these, but I expect
       | now the dataset is out those shouldn't take too long to resolve.
        
         | dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
         | Agree RE long term consistency. After 10 frames I suspect what
         | I'm seeing from that point is a journey through the trained
         | model internals. It doesn't seem to reference back to the
         | original image and very quickly changes to vastly different
         | terrain.
         | 
         | Still impressive!
        
           | aniijbod wrote:
           | "very quickly changes to vastly different terrain"
           | 
           | I anticipate potential use-cases ('level/scene generation' in
           | game content creation) where this actually turns out to be
           | the most valuable aspect of the output. I can't imagine that
           | it would be too much of a stretch to 'start with a photo' as
           | a 'seed' and use it to create a 3D world. My only concern
           | would be 'sameyness tendency', in other words, the problem
           | would be that a variety of seed photos of similar kinds of
           | scenes would end up creating worlds that were too similar to
           | one another to make 'still photo to fly-through movie to
           | navigable detailed 3D world' a sufficiently 'creative' source
           | of sufficiently differentiated new game worlds (or of
           | sufficiently differentiated new fly-through movies). I
           | suspect this could all be fixed by 'differentiator
           | algorithms' interfering with the key variables of the
           | 'refinement' process, as well as broadening and continually
           | adding to the range of movies in the training data.
        
         | andybak wrote:
         | This is the most impressive attempt to tackle temporal
         | consistency that I've come across:
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.08509.pdf
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlCh6-2NfSg
        
       | kingkawn wrote:
       | Enhance.
        
       | techer wrote:
       | Flashbacks to VistaPro on my Amiga.
       | 
       | (Not mine) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48KtJtDqkaM
        
       | xwdv wrote:
       | God damn, John Carmack was right, someday we'll be able to take
       | footage from TV shoes and just walk around in scenes in VR.
        
       | TimTheTinker wrote:
       | Reminds me of weird dreams I've had.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-03-20 23:01 UTC)