On faces
- 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 - Facebook deletes a billion faceprints
Meta is shutting down Facebook's face recognition system and deleting more than a billion face templates. An industry chapter closing, from someone who lived in it.
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 - IBM, Amazon and Microsoft step back from face recognition
In one week, three of the biggest companies in the field paused or ended police sales. Where I agree, and why a pause isn't a policy.
2 min reads likes comments - Clearview scraped three billion faces. This is why we built on-device
The New York Times revealed a startup that matches any photo against billions of faces scraped from social media, and sells it to police. The worst version of my industry is now public.
2 min reads likes comments - ZAO put your face in a movie in eight seconds
A Chinese face-swap app went viral over the weekend and hit a privacy wall within days. China just ran the consumer deepfake experiment at scale.
2 min reads likes comments - Datasets have a consent debt
Microsoft quietly took down MS-Celeb-1M, ten million photos of a hundred thousand people. A lot of the face recognition industry was built on data nobody agreed to give.
2 min reads likes comments - San Francisco banned face recognition. Customers asked if we're next
The ban covers city agencies, not private companies like ours. It still changed a lot of sales conversations this week. Where I think the line should be.
2 min reads likes comments - None of these people exist
Nvidia's StyleGAN generates photographic faces with control over pose, identity and freckles. A face company's view of faces becoming free.
2 min reads likes comments - Thousands of faces in a hotel lobby
Our first live conference check-ins. Wait times dropped a lot. The model was the part that worked from day one. Lighting, queues and printers were not.
2 min reads likes comments - Faces help you hear
Google's Looking to Listen separates one voice from a crowd by watching the speaker's face. Modalities work better when they explain each other.
2 min reads likes comments - Starting a face recognition company, with eyes open
I've co-founded a company that does face recognition on device. Why on device, why conference check-in first, and the lines we won't cross.
2 min reads likes comments - Face swaps on Reddit: I built the harmless version years ago
Someone on Reddit is putting celebrities' faces into porn with a home GPU and open-source tools. How it works, and why consent has to be designed in now.
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 - The camera is the new keyboard
Snap filed to go public and calls itself a camera company. The phrase sounds like marketing, but it describes a real shift in how people put things into computers.
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 - Google Photos gives away what I spent two years building
Unlimited storage and automatic face grouping, free. What happens to small companies when a platform ships their feature as a default.
2 min reads likes comments - Two years of 3D faces on a phone: what I got wrong
Leaving the selfie-to-3D-face app I helped build out of my thesis. The technology mostly worked. The rest is the interesting part.
2 min reads likes comments - Two networks arguing
The GAN paper from NIPS this year: a generator, a discriminator, and a learned idea of what counts as real.
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