[HN Gopher] SceneScript, a novel approach for 3D scene reconstru...
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       SceneScript, a novel approach for 3D scene reconstruction
        
       Author : Klaster_1
       Score  : 111 points
       Date   : 2024-03-23 05:08 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ai.meta.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ai.meta.com)
        
       | ganzuul wrote:
       | I would love to have this as a Blender add-on.
        
       | dTal wrote:
       | I'm sure the tech is neat. But I get a real sinking feeling from
       | how hard tech giants like "Meta" are trying openly to create
       | dystopia. The "Metaverse" is not aspirational!
       | 
       | > That understanding would let AR glasses tailor content to you
       | and your individual context, like seamlessly blending a digital
       | overlay with your physical space
       | 
       | Horrifying, if it ever takes off in the way that "Meta" wants it
       | to. Take the modern smartphone disease and amplify it a few
       | orders of magnitude.
       | 
       | > While LLMs rely on vast amounts of training data that typically
       | comes from a range of publicly available text sources on the web,
       | no such repository of information yet exists for physical spaces
       | at the scale needed for training an end-to-end model.
       | 
       | Considering the tremendous scale in question, the "yet" is also
       | terrifying. The only way to collect such a dataset would be if
       | some large fraction of people were wearing always-on, network
       | connected cameras. Meta clearly sees this future and wants it;
       | the kind of future where everyone wears a Meta headset, all the
       | time, and has their experience of reality mediated through it -
       | optimized to maximize shareholder value of course, under the
       | watchful eye of The Algorithm. A panopticon AI shoggoth.
       | 
       | Meta is an AI paperclip maximizer, and it is getting
       | uncomfortably close to the "RELEASE THE HYPNODRONES" stage.
        
         | globalnode wrote:
         | > _A panopticon AI shoggoth_
         | 
         | That made my day. I do agree, it is creepy but its what theyre
         | pushing.
        
         | idle_zealot wrote:
         | Re: that "yet". I noticed that after a recent update on my
         | Quest the OS gave me a pop-up about a new feature, that when
         | enabled would allow the device to remember my play boundaries
         | and restore them automatically rather than requiring they be
         | re-entered every time the system gets confused about where I
         | am. I was a little confused why it didn't just turn that on by
         | default, it seemed like a straight upgrade to the current
         | handling and shouldn't require anything but a bit of local
         | storage. Scrolling down in the pop-up I was informed that
         | enabling the feature would authorize Facebook to scan my
         | surroundings and upload a complete map of them to use for
         | whatever purposes they desired. I guess they legally need
         | consent for that, and tying a feature improvement to data
         | collection is still totally allowed somehow. So I imagine that
         | they are building that real-world dataset presently.
        
         | ricardobeat wrote:
         | > The only way to collect such a dataset would be
         | 
         | You must have missed the part where they created a synthetic
         | dataset of 100000 environments, trained the network on that,
         | and released it to the public?
         | 
         | Not saying I'm not worried about their plans too, but that is
         | clearly addressed in the text.
        
         | bobajeff wrote:
         | They still have to solve for:
         | 
         | * How uncomfortable the headsets are to wear for long periods
         | if time
         | 
         | * How useless they are (what are they solution for?)
         | 
         | * How ridiculous they look
         | 
         | * How expensive they are
         | 
         | * How expensive it is to produce content for
         | 
         | After they solve these issues then I will worry about the
         | dystopia we are in. VR headsets may look cool and futuristic in
         | the movies but in reality they are just screens you wear on
         | your head and that's it.
        
           | gibmeat wrote:
           | All of these (except maybe the "useless" part) are almost
           | always solved by time (Moore's law)
        
             | bobajeff wrote:
             | I'd think that all of them would be solved by time. I'm
             | just saying they are nothing to be concerned with until
             | they are (and we are still far way from that point in
             | time). They are just fancy demos to make a company look
             | attractive to investors.
        
           | dTal wrote:
           | Much has been written about the dystopia we are already in,
           | but I am specifically concerned about the dystopia they are
           | earnestly building. Meta is aware of these problems and is
           | trying very hard to solve them.
           | 
           | And they won't be useless! That's the worst part. They will
           | provide compelling value, like smartphones, and as such will
           | be impossible to boycott. At first the value will be simple,
           | obvious utility, like route overlays. Later it will be value
           | _within_ the system, much like how the main utility of
           | smartphones now is to run the mandatory apps to participate
           | in aspects of society that previously did not require a
           | smartphone. And of course they will be addictive.
           | 
           | Here is a short sci-fi film depicting what I fear:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
        
         | FeepingCreature wrote:
         | > The Metaverse is not aspirational!
         | 
         | Wait, Snowcrash was horror for you? I thought the whole point
         | of post-cyberpunk was to _not_ assume all tech would be
         | dystopian.
        
           | jprete wrote:
           | Snowcrash is a dystopian libertarian world cleverly hidden by
           | the viewpoint characters treating it as completely normal.
        
       | ImHereToVote wrote:
       | No code. Only for internal research.
        
         | ricardobeat wrote:
         | Obviously, this is likely to be part of a future Quest software
         | update. They did release the training dataset though.
        
       | FlyingBobcat wrote:
       | Want more data? Create an mobile app to cartograph new rental
       | appartments. I know in other countries you often rent with
       | furniture in it. We in germany for example take everything with
       | us and have to check if/how the furniture fits.
       | 
       | With a system like the one in the video you walk through the old
       | place, and walk through the new place, and output for example 2
       | Sweet Home 3d plan's.
       | 
       | No need to have 3d glasses for that.
        
       | WhatIsDukkha wrote:
       | This was a very important missing piece for mixed/augmented and
       | virtual reality.
       | 
       | The semantic understanding of the objects around you (without
       | upload to a server).
       | 
       | A detailed set of actual meshes of the objects in your living and
       | working spaces.
       | 
       | So much can be built on this key building block, to actually help
       | people with their daily lives, low vision people are only one
       | group that will see massive benefits.
       | 
       | I also think this technique could and should be extended
       | generally into computer vision applications, understanding
       | semantic meaning, volumes and masses via the often highly
       | structured environments around us.
       | 
       | Starting from a principled position of meaning, volumes and
       | meshes and then training to assign gaussian splats to those
       | meshes seems like something clever people could solve a lot of
       | problems with.
        
         | nox101 wrote:
         | A huge problem is privacy
         | 
         | > without upload to a server
         | 
         | Doesn't matter. If the app has to render them then it can still
         | send them to the server. If the app does not render directly it
         | can still infer them by doing collision testing against them.
         | If it can't even check for collisions then there isn't much
         | point in having the data in the first place.
         | 
         | It gets worse. The more you want AR/MR to understand the scene
         | the more fine grained data you need. The camera sees things
         | like: the underwear you left on the floor, the medicines/pills
         | on your table, the posters on your wall, the bank account
         | browser tab still on your computer screen, the adult toys you
         | forgot to put away, your undressed body, your dressed body,
         | your political baseball cap or t-shirt, your naked
         | roommate/spouse/kids who just walked into the room.
         | 
         | I don't see how this can be solved in a trust-less way. In
         | other words, you'll have to trust each and every individual
         | AR/MR app you use, that they aren't spying on you. The
         | platform/device/OS itself can not prevent this and still allow
         | the majority of the AR/MR uses that people imagine.
        
           | littlestymaar wrote:
           | Companies don't spy on you because they don't like you, they
           | spy on you because they make money out of it. Outlaw making
           | money out of personal data (by outlawing targeted ads, data
           | purchase for insurance, and data brokers) and the incentives
           | to spy on you disappear.
           | 
           | You can't be probusiness and pro-privacy at the same time
           | though, you need to limit businesses in order to protect the
           | people.
        
           | thoughtlede wrote:
           | Yes, the camera sees everything. But we could avoid teaching
           | the model certain things. For instance, an undressed body and
           | a dressed body could both be taught as a body. Likewise,
           | medicine pills as well as regular mints could just be taught
           | as mints.
           | 
           | While this approach doesn't address privacy completely, it
           | avoids certain elements of our life that are considered
           | really private.
           | 
           | I think half of the point of using the simulated dataset to
           | train the model was to safeguard the above mentioned kind of
           | privacy (with the other half being lack of real-world
           | dataset).
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | I think there must be a way of doing this so you _just_ have
           | to trust the OS. The camera feed itself could be essentially
           | private and only pass on locations and types of objects. In
           | this way you could whitelist  / blocklist items or
           | categories.
           | 
           | But you would defo have to trust the OS, and in this case
           | Meta...
        
         | vergessenmir wrote:
         | Isn't this more of A semantic understanding of how language
         | maps onto geometry rather than understanding of actual space
         | and geometry?
         | 
         | I sometimes feel like this may not work without language
         | helping it along
        
           | WhatIsDukkha wrote:
           | With a multimodal llm watching a stream of these objects,
           | should be able answer the question -
           | 
           | "where are my keys?"
           | 
           | It should be able to respond -
           | 
           | "Here on the dining room table" with an astar path drawn to
           | them in the headset.
           | 
           | It's a stream of tokens that you can almost just reverse
           | search on to find the last instance of "keys" in it (thats a
           | simplification but...).
        
       | doctorhandshake wrote:
       | My issue with this approach is that the synthetic data, and the
       | language used to describe it, necessarily encode a viewpoint - a
       | bias - on the part of the creators. I am firmly behind the need
       | to use language as an intermediary signifier, not just for
       | utility purposes, but because it unlocks the ability to use
       | language as an anchor for arbitrary AR data. My problem with this
       | particular approach is that it requires us all to agree on what
       | things are called, and requires the training dataset to cover
       | everything users might come across.
       | 
       | My feeling is the better approach is to train a generalized
       | segmentation model, derive multi-parameter representations of
       | those segmented 'things', derive embeddings from those things for
       | compression purposes, then allow users to 'tag' or 'label' or
       | 'describe' those things as a service to other users. Then we
       | could choose whose language about the world we 'subscribe' to,
       | and anyone could attach any digital payload to any real
       | thing/person/place without anyone else's help or permission.
        
         | mycall wrote:
         | > My problem with this particular approach is that it requires
         | us all to agree on what things are called
         | 
         | Walk around your home and notice [almost] everything already
         | has a name for it as it comes from some store (unique handmade
         | items are an outlier). Let's just label things we all agree
         | they are called (or give them multiple labels).
        
           | doctorhandshake wrote:
           | I think you overestimate the degree to which your choice of
           | words overlaps with those of others, especially when you try
           | to be more specific than a generic noun by applying modifiers
           | or less-used nouns. What you call a daybed I might call a
           | couch or a sofa or a lounge chair or a chaise or a hassock or
           | a flat couch or a downstairs bed or a family bed ... and all
           | this presumes I speak the same flavor of English you do, or
           | that whoever made the data set is familiar with the type of
           | furniture I live around, or how it's used. The examples are
           | literally limitless, before you even get into the truly
           | subjective things - not just names but opinions about things
           | - that people might want to use to connect digital things to
           | real things. Stuff like 'larger than average', 'wasteful',
           | 'beautiful,' 'sacred', 'durable', etc etc etc
           | 
           | Believing there is one map from the real world to the world
           | of symbols is solipsism.
        
       | wdb wrote:
       | Wished big companies would stop naming their stuff using existing
       | terms, like in this case, scene script.
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | This reminds me a little of SegmentAnything
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-23 23:01 UTC)