DeepDream
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This is what AI sees and hears when it watches 'The Joy of Painting'
Computers don't dream of electric sheep, they imagine the dulcet tones of legendary public access painter, Bob Ross. Bay Area artist and engineer Alexander Reben has produced an incredible feat of machine learning in honor of the late Ross, creating a mashup video that applies Deep Dream-like algorithms to both the video and audio tracks. The result is an utterly surreal experience that will leave you pinching yourself.
ICYMI: CERNs robotic inspectors ride a monorail
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Pairing an Arduino with a skateboard produces the Sick Ollie Machine, capable of measuring angular and X-,Y- or Z-axis accelerations to measure who is hitting their tricks the hardest. Courtesy of Josh Sheldon, the ollie machine uses an Arduino beneath the trucks of the board paired with a relay to measure the stats of each trick. Those who are producing truly sick ollies are rewarded with a chime from the attached cowbell. Meanwhile, over at CERN a set of robot twins have been enlisted to provide live video feeds and environmental measurements for the massive underground complex. The robots, called TIM twins for Train Inspection Monorail, move along a -- you guessed it -- overhead rail that runs throughout the facility in order to monitor stats like oxygen concentration and radiation emissions. Also, don't forget to check out what happens when a frog is run through Google's Deep Dream project (which is easily the weirdest sentence I've written yet today). As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
This is what it looks like when a neural net colorizes photos
We've seen the horrific results of Google's servers taking acid and interpreting photos with DeepDream, but what happens when a neural network does something altogether less terrifying with snapshots? It'll go all Ted Turner and colorize black and white images with what it thinks are the right chroma values based on analyzing countless similar photos. At least that's what a team of University of California at Berkeley researchers experimented with in their paper Colorful Image Colorization (PDF).
Google DeepDream experiment takes you on a trippy VR journey
Google's latest VR experiment involves feeding footage captured by its 360-degree camera rig through the DeepDream machine. Since the company's DeepDream program uses a neural network to transform ordinary images into surrealistic, dream-like artwork, the result is a psychedelic virtual reality experience. If you'll recall, the big G's 360-degree VR platform is called Jump, and it uses a 16-camera circular rig co-designed by GoPro. Google has been uploading videos taken with the rig on YouTube for a while now, but this particular experiment is something new.
Trippy art project has you exploring fractals in virtual reality
Fractal art can already be mesmerizing when you're staring at a 2D picture, but artist Matteo Zamagni has found a way to kick things up a notch. His Nature Abstraction art project has you diving into 3D fractals thanks to both an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and the almost psychedelic imagery from Google's neural network-based Deepdream. The result, as you'll see below, is rather hypnotic -- you're floating through formula-based shapes that are at once familiar and completely alien. Zamagni sees it as a way to challenge the accuracy of your perceptions. You're sadly too late to see this installation in person (it was part of an exhibit at London's Barbican this August), but here's hoping that it resurfaces... it looks like a wild mind trip.
