[HN Gopher] Nvidia's "Kitchen" Keynote was faked (rendered) and ...
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       Nvidia's "Kitchen" Keynote was faked (rendered) and nobody noticed
        
       Author : avnigo
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-08-12 22:01 UTC (58 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blogs.nvidia.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blogs.nvidia.com)
        
       | kfprt wrote:
       | Is there a turing test for visual reality? This would seem to
       | indicate that in at least some instances that reality is
       | indistinguishable from CG.
        
         | ben_w wrote:
         | I doubt any formal attempt to define such a test exists, given
         | attempts at ultra-realistic painting as an art style predates
         | Turing: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Shishkin_-
         | _Rozh'...
        
         | themodelplumber wrote:
         | That sounds like it could be interesting. It's funny how much
         | of our "reality" / perceived universe is simply imagined or
         | taken for granted even without any CG involved.
         | 
         | Even in simple text, I can relate to you my relief at finding a
         | news article on HN which was posted by my stealth marketing
         | team on behalf of Nvidia today, or I can describe the tiny
         | white kitten curled up on my chest as I type this from the
         | couch I found on the street.
         | 
         | In a way, that expression will create an effect similar to the
         | Nvidia CG project for a lot of people.
         | 
         | Meanwhile, I have no tiny white kitten, I'm not laying on a
         | couch, and I don't work on a stealth marketing team. But some
         | will go as far as visualizing what I must look like, or waxing
         | sentimental about kittens.
         | 
         | Some others would even doubt the retraction of those
         | statements, merely because of a constant inner perceptive
         | mandate which causes them to work extra hard at never getting
         | caught closing off possibilities.
        
         | contravariant wrote:
         | I mean it's not as if the Turing test is immensely complicated.
         | For VR you can just make people compare a rendering with the
         | view of a real camera and see if people can tell the
         | difference.
        
       | beebeepka wrote:
       | Huang is starting to look like Kaku.
       | 
       | I haven't seen this one and while I am sure many have missed,
       | there's no way "nobody noticed". Of course, this is direct PR
       | material straight from Nvidia. Such material is hard for me to
       | read because at 50 percent is junk words and sentences
        
         | exdsq wrote:
         | Agreed in general but imagine a VR video game that looks so
         | good even 20-percent think it's a movie. That's awesome.
        
           | huseyinkeles wrote:
           | Half Life Alyx did at some moments feel extremely real to me,
           | it was a weird experience.
        
           | slapfrog wrote:
           | Chasing photorealism in games seems misguided to me; you have
           | to spend _much_ more money on artists. And at the end of the
           | day, photorealism won 't make a bad game into a good game; so
           | that money is better spent on other aspects of the game.
           | Furthermore, if you're committed to spending that much money
           | on a game, it will probably have a very conservative lowest-
           | common-denominator design to recoup as much money as
           | possible. Who will take risks and experiment when so much
           | money is on the line? You end up with a game that is mediocre
           | to everybody but exceptional to few. The video game
           | equivalent of a big budget marvel movie.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | This is a bit of a weird one. Sometimes VR is super obviously
           | rendered in a certain game engine, but sometimes, even on my
           | now aging Vive it just looks absolutely astonishing.
           | 
           | I have a photogrammetry scan of some guys room as my VR home
           | on Steam and it's genuinely eery how I have to do a double
           | take sometimes.
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | Is that just the people with bad eyesight or who are neuro
           | atypical and so can't see the flaws and/or tell from the
           | weird body movements?
           | 
           | What's the closest example in mainstream media of cg human
           | that [almost] passes?
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | CGI is much more widely used in film than I think you think
             | it is. Half the distance/crowd shots in LotR nearly 20
             | years ago now were CGI, from what I remember, and e.g. the
             | following scenes of the car sequence in Deadpool use CG
             | humans in far more places than I'd guessed from having
             | watched the film: https://youtu.be/C8D_o8bOeOc
        
       | 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
       | s/noticed/cared/
        
       | avnigo wrote:
       | Direct link to video explanation from article:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70
        
         | levng wrote:
         | From 23m05s
        
       | weare138 wrote:
       | Why does Nvidia's corporate blog keep referring to itself in the
       | 3rd person? Are corporations just writing their own reviews now?
        
         | mhh__ wrote:
         | Maybe they're facilitating people copy and pasting their text?
        
       | tomcooks wrote:
       | Not dissimilar to the last broadcasted speech of the queen of
       | England
        
         | readthenotes1 wrote:
         | There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they
         | prefer the company of Canadians.
        
       | pbhjpbhj wrote:
       | It says in the YouTube video, and shows in the clips that the
       | keynote revealed the rendering immediately as part of the show?
       | 
       | I didn't see the full thing, but the posture and lighting in the
       | clips in the making-of don't look like they'd have convinced
       | anyone? (See YouTube video avnigo links).
       | 
       | Is this just marketing saying water isn't wet or am I missing
       | something?
        
         | bellyfullofbac wrote:
         | Seems like the reveal was at the end of the 2021 keynote:
         | https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=6470
         | 
         | But he was in the kitchen at the beginning of the 2020 keynote:
         | https://youtu.be/bOf2S7OzFEg?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOZ2BSwG4CHmKSVH...
         | 
         | You can spot straight away that he looks like he's in a Zoom
         | meeting with a fake background, he has a green halo behind his
         | hair, and after he says "Our first kitchen keynote." he moves
         | his shoulders and you can see the background behind his
         | shoulders move. (Edit: what the hell, the moving background is
         | visible in the 1080p version, but not really in the 2160p one!
         | So I guess that's YouTube's compressor's fault.)
         | 
         | Since they already built a very detailed model of his kitchen,
         | it would've been more interesting if they had a multi camera
         | setup, or even a camera that moves around, like in the BBC
         | studio https://www.bbc.com/sport/av/olympics/58113457
         | 
         | And the "deepfaked" Jensen seems to me is also very easy to
         | spot...
        
       | jFriedensreich wrote:
       | from the very first keynote in his kitchen i was waiting for it
       | to be rendered there was not a chance jensen would not do that
       | one day :D
        
       | stickydink wrote:
       | Speaking as someone who really doesn't know how long these things
       | take, is this accurate?
       | 
       | > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT59YOdch8M
       | 
       | > Typically this type of project would take a team months to
       | complete and weeks to render.
        
       | sen wrote:
       | > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using
       | uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article
       | is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's
       | important.
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
       | 
       | Clickbait title, it was very clear it was rendered at the time
       | and there was no attempt to hide it.
        
         | r1ch wrote:
         | Indeed, the blog post is referring to this effect:
         | https://youtu.be/KboaLRKbaBU?t=191. Suggesting the entire thing
         | was rendered is very misleading.
        
           | OJFord wrote:
           | There's no way it can mean just that, since that's beyond
           | obviously not real, and not even trying to be?
        
       | evv555 wrote:
       | I showed Netflix's "Love Death + Robots: Ice Age"[1] to several
       | people and no one noticed it's CGI until I pointed it out. Even
       | then I had to point out particular details until they really
       | believed it.
       | 
       | 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGEUv6CCPM
        
         | jrootabega wrote:
         | Even Topher Grace and the other one? Or just the stuff in the
         | freezer?
        
         | dnissley wrote:
         | All I can find by searching is that this episode was the only
         | one to include live action (IMDb trivia, for example:
         | https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9788514/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv) --
         | what makes you think it's cgi?
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-12 23:00 UTC)