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Turn Real Life Into A Cartoon
Saige writes "Ever wanted to see yourself in a cartoon? Before now, there were means to turn a single image into something cartoon-like, but some folks at Microsoft Research have come up with a method to turn a video into an animated cartoon. It's not up to doing it fully automated, as you have to hand-mark various parts of the video every 10 to 15 frames, but the video of the results is quite impressive."
My first thought-- oh, great. Put me out of work.
But then I came to my senses. Of course this kind of thing would never replace traditional animation. After all, you'd still have to have actors enact the scenes to be animated, the backgrounds would have to be set up or altered, etc. Setting up a shoot of a scene to be animated could end up being more of a PITA than just animating it to begin with. Though the end result could be a cool rotoscope/Waking Life effect, it's not a "cheat" to get an animated feature without the tedious work of animating.
> I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Why does everything have to be groundbreaking?
Sometimes the most important developments are the ones that simply involve someone taking the time to put two and two together.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
If it's good enough for Newton, why not these guys?
Advanced users are users too!
I have only had three "blue screens" on my wife's XP box, but the number of times that it spontaneously reboots (especially when using not-so-quick-switch)... it is mindboggling.
Speaking as someone who works on windows machines all day doing tech support for end users (on verticle market database frontends) I can honestly 90% of all bluescreens are caused by hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
I've had buggy device drivers kernel panic my linux box too - so its not just a windows thing.
I honestly can't remember the last time either my work pc (which runs Windows 2000) or my home pc which runs XP bluescreened.