Thursday Next Posted February 25, 2016 Report Share Posted February 25, 2016 What's been discontinued? The kicking or the dog? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted February 25, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2016 The dog. The kicking will continue until morale improves. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted March 18, 2016 Report Share Posted March 18, 2016 I'm not too sure how I feel about this. It's neat but it has tons of potential for abuse if done correctly. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 18, 2016 Report Share Posted March 18, 2016 The translator thing was cool, could make dubs of live action movies less distracting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted March 20, 2016 Report Share Posted March 20, 2016 Wait for the magnetic spring and latch. Blew my god damn mind. This video also explains how my car phone holder works without screwing with the electronics. It's not like the metal plate behind my phone cover is blocking the magnetic field but the magnetic field is just that short and it might have something to do with poly-magnets. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted March 22, 2016 Author Report Share Posted March 22, 2016 This stuff is seemingly a lot further along than I thought. Probably stupidly expensive and likely for the most part in use by Panasonics own factories at the moment. Japan is defo the centre for this, mainly cos the latter half of the video is focused on the elderly which will become very important for the industry, as well as allowing workers to continue working for longer into their lives (which is gonna happen) Meanwhile the middle of the video... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 31, 2016 Report Share Posted March 31, 2016 (edited) https://t.co/MMEpSZ1pKg Apparently self driving cars are confused by crappy lane markings, and car makers are saying this means we need better markings. It seems to me that's something the car needs to be able to deal with, so it's on the car makers to figure it out. I mean, even if we completely standardize markings and get 99% of the roadways fixed and up to spec the car still needs to be able to deal with that remaining 1%. Edited March 31, 2016 by TheMightyEthan Fix link 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted April 2, 2016 Report Share Posted April 2, 2016 That would mean interpolating between crappy lane markings and with any modeling, there will always be a chance of error and an error here means a crash. This could be pinned on the car manufactures. Telling countries, states and cities to improve their roads (they really should around here in LA...) is shifting consequences to them if an self driving car do fail. It's part of the growing pains of this tech that needs to happen. And it's not a bad thing to tell states DOT and cities to get their acts together. I don't think an adversarial tone is good though since manufactures and state DOT and cities should work together on this problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted April 2, 2016 Report Share Posted April 2, 2016 My point is no matter how good the roads get there still going to be some portion of them that are without good lane markings, so no matter what the cars are going to be able to need to deal with that. If they can't then the tech simply isn't there yet for fully autonomous vehicles. That said, it also wouldn't surprise me if in 2-3 years something that currently seems like an almost unsolvable engineering problem becomes trivially easy. I mean 2-3 years ago no one was even really talking about self driving cars for consumers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheFlyingGerbil Posted April 2, 2016 Report Share Posted April 2, 2016 Even if road markings are 100%, there could be snow or wet leaves obscuring markings, or wet roads and low winter sun combine to create reflections that dazzle out road markings. Rural roads often don't have edge markings to begin with, and while it's a nice idea that roads are fully maintained, that's not going to happen, and frankly that's not how I'd best like council's scant money being spent. I find it a bit troubling they're pushing forward so fast with this when such a fundamental issue is unresolved and their solution is not only impracticable, but doesn't even address the underlying problem. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted April 3, 2016 Author Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 Honestly it strikes me as a pretty weird issue for the US to have given such a car-centric society. Was surprised a few years ago on the story of some states digging up roads rather than repairing them. I doubt it's an game breaking issue for them, there's more than one way they gather data on the roads, and in this case the cars mentioned, both the Volvo and the Tesla, are only semi-autonomous and likely not outfitted with the kind of tech Googles fully-auto cars will have (which given it mentions the semi-auto tech adds only $4K to the price of a car, and the LIDAR that Google use is $75K a pop there's a wee discrepancy) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted April 3, 2016 Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 With humans driving you don't need to have the lane markers and stuff perfectly kept up, because humans can make inferences based on limited data. Which isn't to say it's not an issue, but it's not a critical one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted April 3, 2016 Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 I was surprised to learn that they used LiDAR. LiDAR is the best surveying tool I know of. It's awesome for research purposes and to see it having practical use is neat. While the research LiDAR are detailed as hell (you can pick out different type of trees, cut through the trees to get just the ground surface and/or see features that would be hard to see otherwise due to lighting), I can see it having problems with reading the road due to the low angles. Car learning the road is pretty much the only thing I know of that could solve the line-of-sight issue that camera, radar and LiDAR have and still have the car be self sufficient. If cars can have a local database/cache of what to expect for XYZ Road to compare to what they see, then it should work even with degraded roads. For covered up markings... I would take a page from snow country and suggest poles. Sure it makes the car less self sufficient but for most places, it's just an upgraded light/power pole. It also goes back to my signal broadcaster suggestion. It would also be a good opportunity to add a sort of broadcaster to serve as a benchmark every couple of poles. As for rural roads... well, this is why I don't think cars will be completely self driving. For most people, it should stay auto but there are times it should hand control of the car to you... people might be too inexperience to drive at that point if the car doesn't know how to handle it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted April 3, 2016 Author Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 I'm now aware that we might be the only folks who know what LIDAR is. The similar naming to RADAR I imagine will clue most folks in, just light instead of radiation. I know it from 3D work, it's essentially used to "mocap" a landscape. So for example with the Avengers fight scenes they'll likely have done a crap ton of lidar and 360 photo scans of the area, allowing them to make a rough (point data still needs manual tweaking, though I imagine it has improved since I was last taught about it) 3D scan of the area. You won't really use it for the purpose of redoing a shot or making a fake NYC street (though they did a most of fake NYC in Avengers...I guess it's gotten better...and they have more money) but usually use it to put your CGI elements into "location" in your 3D scan, then apply that to the film footage. Or use it for early pre-viz work. Get a lidar scan of potential location and put your scenes in there with simple 3D figures n such. https://www.fxguide.com/featured/pointcloud9-a-lidar-case-study/ Also in finding the above article I found out that the UK gov has been LIDAR scanning the majority of the UK and that's open data (honestly I do love the whole digital transparency stuff going on with the gov atm, and it's getting better) https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2015/06/16/free-mapping-data-will-elevate-flood-risk-knowledge/ Which I guess reminds me of a wee hazard: Of late we've had more n more flooding in the UK, hopefully the cars can recognise floods and navigate those. But I've a feeling it'll be completely useless. Heck I wonder if it'll understand fords....err as in the river crossing not the car brand. I guess they'll have fords in their database. I guess one thing is they could potentially recognise floods, or be alerted to upcoming floods and drive to high ground to save themselves which'll reduce at least some of the cost impact of flooding. Way too many shots of cars submerged to the roof on the news. Oh a potential work around for the poor marking is Beacons. They're being used for internal GPS at the moment (as well as Facebook being all creepy with letting companies know when you're passing by). The tech is very early stages, and I'm not sure it's designed to work at high speeds or walking pace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon Google have their own unsurprisingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddystone_(Google) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted April 3, 2016 Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 @Mal: I think you're underestimating how quickly technology is developing. I'm sure all these problems which sound like "well self driving cars just won't be able to do that" type problems will be easily solved in a few years. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted April 3, 2016 Author Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 Oh yeah, on that forgot to reply to your "2-3 years ago no one was thinking about self driving cars for consumers". Turns out Google announced their car in 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted April 3, 2016 Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 But what I meant was until the last year or two it was all research, not application focused. As you pointed out Google's rig cost $75k a pop, they weren't planning to sell that to the average person. Now we have companies saying they'll be releasing semi-autonomous vehicles to the general public next year. The tech is advancing faster than most people realize, so I doubt the crappy signage is going to be a major problem for too long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted April 3, 2016 Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 Ethan, I'm just trying to not pull in science fiction in predicting where we will be. I'm also not saying it is impossible. There are many ways to go about it which are already said by the article you posted. Besides signage/road markings, a car can use parked cars, side walks and other common static fixtures as reference points. Signage and road markings are just the (ideally) most consistent. There are also modeling/database to check up against which is mentioned in the article. All these solutions will have costs attached to them, along with margin of error that leads to discussions about safety and ultimately, liability if all these systems fail. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted April 3, 2016 Report Share Posted April 3, 2016 I guess my point is that getting all that fixed for all the roads is so far outside the realm of plausibility that it's not really worth talking about, and until cars can handle roads with imperfect markings they're simply not ready. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted April 16, 2016 Author Report Share Posted April 16, 2016 Kinda neat, a "e-skin" that can measure oxygen levels. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36055501 Also a gorwing sign BBC need to sort their categories out as this showed up under health, tech n science. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted May 11, 2016 Author Report Share Posted May 11, 2016 Kinda neat, though be curious on the applications. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted May 11, 2016 Report Share Posted May 11, 2016 Didn't the first X-Men movie have a map made like that? Except in the movie each moving piece was about the width of a pencil. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted May 11, 2016 Author Report Share Posted May 11, 2016 Yeah. I think these days the push is more towards the Iron Man style UI in the likes of Holo Lens n VR. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thursday Next Posted May 11, 2016 Report Share Posted May 11, 2016 Doesn't seem like it would be better at modelling anything like tsunami effects or what have you, but does make things more easily understandable. Could also be a great accessibility tool for those who are blind? You could feel pie-charts etc. I dunno. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted May 28, 2016 Report Share Posted May 28, 2016 Since I don't really have a perfect place to put this but: three time in a row. This one might tip over over the next 24 hours but hey, reusable first stage is quite the sure thing now. As for this video, this has to be one of the neater perspective I have seen. You go up and down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.