On 3d
- A weekend with the World API
World Labs opened an API for Marble. I spent the weekend building a small workbench for rendering its worlds as Gaussian splats and authoring camera paths through them. What broke: scale, coordinates and drift.
3 min reads likes comments - LeCun leaves, Marble ships
In one week World Labs launched Marble, Yann LeCun confirmed he's leaving Meta to start a world-model company, and Google shipped Gemini 3. The world-model bet went public from three directions.
2 min reads likes comments - Genie 2 and World Labs in the same week
DeepMind's Genie 2 turns one image into a playable 3D world, and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs turns one image into a 3D scene you can walk through. Worlds are the next medium after text, images and video.
2 min reads likes comments - Gaussian splatting killed my mesh nostalgia
3D Gaussian Splatting represents a scene as millions of fuzzy, colored blobs and renders it in real time at NeRF quality. It does this without a neural network.
2 min reads likes comments - Vision Pro scans your face to make you
Apple's headset builds a 3D 'Persona' of your face so you can appear on video calls while wearing it. Ten years after my thesis, 3D face capture ships inside a headset.
2 min reads likes comments - NeRF went from hours to seconds
Nvidia's Instant NGP trains a neural radiance field in seconds with a multiresolution hash table. The representation mattered more than the network.
2 min reads likes comments - The metaverse needs faces first
Facebook is now Meta and says it's building the metaverse. From someone who spent years on 3D faces: avatars that can't emote are just chat rooms with legs.
2 min reads likes comments - A whole scene stored inside a network
NeRF represents a 3D scene as a small neural network you can render from any viewpoint. No mesh, no triangles. My old thesis problem, answered from a different direction.
2 min reads likes comments - Face ID: the 3D face is finally consumer hardware
The iPhone X projects 30,000 infrared dots onto your face to unlock the phone. Four years ago I was faking this in software from a single selfie.
2 min reads likes comments - Still caring about facial conformation
My last paper from grad school is out. Why I still think geometric priors for faces matter when every result now comes from deep learning.
2 min reads likes comments - Radial basis functions, for people who don't care about radial basis functions
I presented a facial animation paper this week. What it's about, explained with a rubber sheet, some pins and a steel plate.
3 min reads likes comments - Why my 3D faces look dead: the physics of skin
Our app gets the shape of your face right and still looks like a wax museum. Most of the problem turned out to be motion.
3 min reads likes comments - Graduated. My thesis in one paragraph, and how deep learning will eat it
What my master's thesis on 3D face meshes does, which part of it I think neural networks will replace soon, and which part I think they won't.
2 min reads likes comments