Sure, the Live Photo version has distracting movement, but it also has much more natural motion in terms of hair flow. And I feel that the camera instability helps give context to the video, that it's some kind of impromptu selfie on a windy day.
The Pix version offers a clearer image at what I feel is a large cost to the image's integrity. It looks a bit creepy. That said, there are probably lots of good situations for Pix's stabilization tech, but that example didn't seem optimal as a landing page demo.
I'm sure you're right on both accounts, but man, they are really creepy. I keep thinking I'm watching the trailer from a horror movie and something is going to jump out of the frame - or that I'm staring at a mannequin that should be still, but isn't. Very odd.
About creepy, but in another sense.
They are used alot in public ads instead of static pictures, and i think i found one reason they dont do full on video.
Saw a underwear ad in the subway with full blown video, as in the whole model was moving, and that looked like a porn ad, nobody dared to stare at it.Especially compared to the ad next to it with some subtle motions of just the hair.
Just as a point of comparison, I thought it was creepy for about 10 seconds, too. Then, for some reason, my brain adapted to where I think I'd now prefer the Microsoft Pix version of the image over the Apple one. Brains are weird, I guess.
The Pix version looks like one of those old computer games when they wanted to animate some wind, but cut only afford to animate a handful of sprites on the screen. So everything is stiff as a board except for some flipping scarves/hair/etc...
They're talking about the more general effect of a complete hand-drawn background with mobile sprites/items layered on top (usually with somewhat different color palette &al, so you'd "see the seams" so to speak between what would or had moved and the actual immoveable background)
I am imagining a developer at Microsoft somewhere holding their head in their hands when they saw the Live Photo comparison made by the marketing team. To me, they don't really seem to be aiming for the same thing at all - the Pix version is a highly stylised animation whereas the Live Photo is simply a very short, silent video.
I know the Live Photo example on this Pix page is silent, but it's important for people to realize that Apple Live Photos are not -- they capture several seconds of sound.
I "know" this but often forget. When I look through iMessage history at pictures I've sent and received, there are often stray bits of overheard conversation that the sender wouldn't necessarily want or intend to include.
> I "know" this but often forget. When I look through iMessage history at pictures I've sent and received, there are often stray bits of overheard conversation that the sender wouldn't necessarily want or intend to include.
I was surprised with this too. This should be really made more clear.
It's not just a bit creepy, it's firmly planted in the depths of the uncanny valley. The other (still photo) examples make me think they are pulling tricks with exposure and light balance, but the live photo feature is cheesy and gimmicky (and yes, highly unsettling in the example they give).
I'm going to try it out on my iPhone 6, but I expect I'll stick with the iPhone camera app for serious photos unless Pix blows me away.
The Pix example looks like a cinemagraph. They can be really neat and beautiful. There is a popular subreddit, /r/cinemagraphs, and other various google results. Maybe those are examples of what you could accomplish with Pix - but surely you would still need some manual touchup to make it loop perfectly as it should.
There was something happening to "cinemagraphs" in the few years since they became popular. I'm pretty sure it started with this blog: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ It took movie scenes/moments and tried to capture their essence in a few frames (of a GIF beneath tumblrs file size restrictions, as an additional challenge). The resultes were quite breathtaking and some of the best, to me, feel very "alive". You could see people breathe and blink and stuff:
It's a totally different thing. If Pix managed to do the first type of "cinemagraph" automatically, that would be pretty cool. But it seems to be more the second type of "cut out some part of the image and make it not move" type of animation. Too bad.
I only saw the grass blowing scene in the main video and was like, "what do all these people mean about it being creepy?". That's some shit right there though.
Imagine looking back at your younger years from your pixel hammock overlooking the digital sunset, and you see a picture like that... now you're depressed because you remembered the physical world as being so beatiful compared to the digital world, esp after the big virus slowdown of 2251, but now you think "it must have been a creepy world after all".
Yea, it's interesting tech but it plain doesn't work right. It looks like a "cinemagraph generator" (like it was first popularized with this blog: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ ). Only it does the (IMO rather tacky or at least very stylized) version of it that makes people look "frozen in time" instead of trying to loop natural motion. It looks like a filter/effect rather than, well,... an enhanced video. Not better but different.
IMO this is one of those things Apple tends to "get". Did they have comparable tech to Pix somewhere cooked up in their labs? I dare to bet so. Did they use it as a suggestion for a "default" enhancement mode? Nope. That thing is a gimmick and seems more appropriate for a third party app.
The auto-adjust for faces looks nice but don't most cameras have that for years, now?
Since Pix is an alternative to the built in Apple app, it makes sense that it provides an alternative functionality from a user standpoint...and perhaps from a not-getting-booted-out-of-the-app-store standpoint.
As a person pushing get off my lawn age, taking selfies feels unseemly even though I know it is entirely mainstream among younger people. One of the things I find interesting about photography is how rapidly the 'uncanny valley' becomes normal. I look at Instagram filters and wonder
'why I would want to make something look like a Polaroid?' It just means the filter is not for me.
Just a matter of terminology: Instagram filters don't contribute to the uncanny valley--they may make a photo look less accurate, but they don't make the subjects look less like human beings (and therefore don't trigger the revulsion or at least discomfort that is the defining characteristic of the uncanny valley).
Now Snapchat filters, on the other hand... (e.g. the bee filter, shudder)
Looks like a much lower frame-rate too, like Pix is choosing a specific number of "like" frames and dropping the rest in the name of stabilizing the comp.
Easy pick: the Apple version is natural, the Microsoft one is artificial. Maybe some cultural thing and Americans like the unnatural steady shot, I'm from the old continent and am completely distracted by the unnatural look of the Microsoft version.
This feels sort of redundant... that feature list (multiple face detection with auto exposure/white balance, burst mode with an algorithm to guess which one is "best") is all stuff the built-in camera app on iOS does already.
Okay, the color and white balance look a little better for Pix in the example shots, but everyone's RAW processing is better in some situations and worse in others. I'm sure Apple could come back with just as many example shots where their own settings were better than Pix's, and we could go round and round like that forever.
There's nothing wrong with this app, but I'm having trouble understanding why it exists. What does this do for users or Microsoft?
I could be totally wrong, but if I had to guess, they are using it to show off / validate their work on Microsoft Cognitive Services (Project Oxford). It has facial recognition, along with a number of other things, and so this would be an easy way of getting data on possible problems they have and how well their algorithms work. Just a guess though.
Facial recognition is pretty much solid for most cameras now, though. Face registration, which Sony have been rolling into some E-mount cameras, would be more impressive.
It's a bit different if you're prioritizing exposure of different faces based on their attributes though right? If you're taking a photo of a black person and a white person together you're often underexposing someone or overexposing someone.
There's a certain threshold in terms of added-value that has to be met in order for "yet another" app to live on my home screen. This pix app looks like it may have a bit of cool technology behind it, but will I install it? big nope.
Ooh, they mention it includes Hyperlapse! I haven't looked into Pix too much so I don't know if this is a full implementation (someone commented on an unnatural-looking stabilization demo, but I think it was just a poor choice of an example), but Hyperlapse is one of the coolest research projects I've come across:
My untrained eye can't really notice a difference except that the pix version looks brighter (even washed out), the live photo version looks really uncanny valley (where the faces don't move but the world does around them is an unsettling effect).
My first thought when playing with the slider was that the Apple version was much better. But, if you focus on the faces (which was probably the intent of the person taking the photo) they do come out better in the Pix version. I think all the examples had the faces underexposed, so the "fix" for each of them was to brighten the photo.
Gotcha. It's a shame it seems to overexpose the background as a result though; that's something I could quickly reproduce in the photos app. Though if it's doing it automatically for each shot based on the faces in the photo I suppose it's novel and more convenient.
That's what I was thinking as well: it'd be really cool if they did some sort of automatic exposure bracketing and combined the best areas of each version since every one of their sample photos generally looks overexposed, especially compared to what Apple's built-in HDR mode would do.
Agreed on the uncanny valley comment. It's interesting to me that very uniform "smile and look at the camera" is the desired outcome of pictures for so many. This page seems to work on the unspoken assumption that the perfect smile in front of some other thing is the ideal picture. I definitely prefer pictures of people doing something other than staring at a lens with a rehearsed smile. It seems that this and so much other camera algorithmic work is aimed at idealizing that posed picture style.
Downloaded it myself and tried it, and the difference is noticeable. I have to say, the result was better than what the default iOS camera app took. The Live Image is hit or miss (it really depends on what you are capturing), but it works.
I was on vacation recently and used Pix all over---I got many great photos that were clearly better than what I would have gotten with the stock app (the built-in comparison feature is a great idea), even on landscapes where there weren't faces to focus on.
Pix also managed to take a fantastic Live Image of my sister and me, which is really special because I don't get to see her very often. Thanks to you all for that.
Chief area that I think needs improvement is on general speed optimizations, startup is slow and feedback when taking a shot could be clearer (i.e., when is it done after I hit the shutter?).
If I had to guess, the diversity of Android hardware and operating system versions in the wild make delivering a quality experience more difficult compared to the narrower range of Apple devices and their generally higher specification of processors and cameras.
And if I were to wildly speculate, Apple phone owners are a more desirable demographic to pursue over the long run.
Please get your facts straight before your distort them :)
Windows phone (now w10 mobile) camera has supported these stuff for some years now (either natively or via extensions). Don't forget that "Live Photo" is Apples implementation of an old Nokia technology.
Windows Phone is no more. The current OS on Microsoft phones is Windows 10 Mobile. It includes Lumia Tools for editing and the Camera app appears to have similar image processing for faces and scenes based on my experience [yes, I own a Microsoft phone].
How long would it take over 1200 baud modem? Who cares?
It's a page about a camera app it probably needs to have images. And it creates animations so it's useful to include samples of that, right? I like to moan about website sizes as well but here it's sort of justified.
>It's a page about a camera app it probably needs to have images.
See http://www.bing.com as a counter example. They load in a beautiful animated background, far larger and higher resolution than any image on the Pix site. Total page size? 364KB. Yes, it's over 100 times smaller.
You can still have images and animations without it using absurd amounts of data. This is just sloppy optimization, especially for a mobile app where data usage is most important.
First of all I want to just say that I think it's great to see MS isn't giving up and keeping to try and reinvent yourself. Sooner or later you are going to get something really big right.
Second of all. I think there is something wrong with the top animation, it's very janky.
Looks cool! How big is your team, and are you in Redmond or Mountain View? What language(s) did you use? How long have you been working on this project? Is the Hyperlapse feature done server-side or on device?
Good thought and we have heard feedback on this issue from others as well. We are working on a solution that simplifies the path to delete while still aligning to requirements for our app and iOS.
Having developed for all major three mobile platforms, I would order them as Windows Phone, iOS, Android in what concerns developer tooling, with Windows Phone having the best experience.
Sadly Microsoft management has shot themselves on both foots multiple times.
I wouldn't say Windows Phone is the worst. It performs well on low spec hardware, it gets updates, and the Nokia lineup provides better value than equivalently priced Android phones.
As a shareholder, I get that not everything in research will be profitable... but I don't see how you'll be successful with this -- I don't see any ROI.
I've played with the application and in the cases that you've showcased, yes... if you have a light source behind people when taking a picture, the picture won't look great. You've come up with some clever software that helps that I guess? Playing around with it... it sure didn't do anything amazing when I was taking pictures of my dogs, and it didn't help me take better selfies -- I'll have to wait until tomorrow to test it on people.
As of right now I'm really scratching my head what the value of this is.
I know that's hard to hear, and I know it takes courage to post on Hacker News... but really guys, you're Microsoft. Figure out what you're trying to do, and put adequate resources into it. This WordPress site is pretty amateur... a flat image with text you can't read on a phone to advertise the benefits of a mobile app? No guys, that's just really really bad.
Do you not take pride in your work? Or were you rushed? Either way, why are you posting something half-baked here? You've got resources most companies on here would only dream of.
No, I know some MS vendors and the work is usually competitive and tightly budgeted. Think of the power Walmart has over vendors to get good pricing and you'll get the idea.
I agree, even the comparator descriptions seem weirdly awkward and placeholdery, describing the mechanism used to compare images rather than the comparison (e.g. "animated gif comparison" showing an animated gif used to compare two static images).
The whole thing is presented as if the marketing team haven't worked on it yet.
The last item is very prevalent throughout many microsoft.com pages. https://azure.microsoft.com has gotten it right here but I'm wondering what's preventing the rest of microsoft.com to do the same.
I'd like one point clarified: is this app entirely local or does it make use of any kind of cloud backend?
I've already seen apps that upload photos away for processing without making it obvious (for example http://prisma-ai.com, if I'm not mistaken). I really shouldn't have to ask if only iOS had a permission for network access.
You're correct that Prisma uploads images and processes them "in the cloud" - but only for about half the filters. It's kind of weird and it isn't immediately obvious what the difference is between "cloud" filters and "local" filters.
We wanted to provide an easy option for users not currently on an iOS device, but only use the number for a 1-time SMS with a link to the Pix listing in the App Store. We do not collect or store the phone numbers, out of respect for user privacy.
The results remind me of older special effects or manual brushing in Photoshop... they are not very natural and not very good. Beeing myself also a photographer: Don't do this to your photos. The best A.I. and filters cannot compensate a well lighted photo. I'm happy that Apple does not include such destructive filtering. IMHO even a flash from your phone is better than this filters.
I have been using Pix for a few weeks now and am very happy with the quality. Too bad you can't use it as the default camera app on iOS. Also it takes significantly longer to start up. But if you are taking multiple shots of, say, your kids, the quality is better.
Happy to hear you are enjoying it! We are working on a widget that will allow you to quick launch Pix from the Lock or Today screens, which we hope will help lessen the frustration of not being able to set it as default.
Microsoft's not heavily devoting resources to Windows Phone at the moment. They're phasing out Lumias, and focusing on getting the enterprise experience right on their mobile devices with the HP Elite x3.
Windows Phone isn't really dead, but until Microsoft is ready, they're focusing on winning over iOS and Android users with their apps.
So why not stop it altogether? I'm forced to use one of those Windows Phones. The App Store is terrible. Few apps for the simplest things and god are they terrible...
I honestly can't fathom being forced over to another platform right now. Years of having to support them later, I still don't understand how anyone makes sense of the UI of iOS (it seems intuitive to non-tech people?) and the terrible colossal trainwreck that is where Google has brought Android in the last few years rules out... almost every other phone out there. (I carried an Android for seven years, I've finally had enough, I can't stand that trash anymore.)
We need a third option. If it's not Microsoft, it's gotta come from somewhere else.
My impression is that this is very similar to the official camera app on Windows, if not a direct port. I would not be surprised if at least some code was shared. Maybe?
In the section under "Hover Zoom Comparison", the Apple Camera photo is to the left of the Pix photo. In every other comparison, the Pix photo comes first. You should maintain that order because people don't read the title always and could confuse them. Once you've established a pattern, such as Pix on the left and Apple's on the right, don't change it. It's an inconvenience that the user doesn't mention but feels. Also, a consistent pattern takes a less cognitive load.
The Pix images just look mostly like the contrast was reduced and all the dark pixels were made brighter. That's not improving the images in my mind, it's just throwing away color depth and subtlety.
None of the comparison images have been altered via Photoshop. All comparisons were shot simultaneously on a side-by-side rig, using a trigger that prompted the shutter press for both apps (Apple Camera and Microsoft Pix) at the same time, so conditions would be as equivalent as possible. See a photo of the rig in action here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpi.... We did crop the edges of some photos to fit into the available space, but otherwise the images are the unaltered files that were produced by each app.
A curious mind, like myself, found the "Photoshop 3.0" in the jpeg meta data and came to the conclusion that the comparison images had been altered via Photoshop (or similar tool)
To avoid doubt, I would advise that all image comparisons should have references to the original source files.
It's Wordpress, whereas other parts of www.microsoft.com are not. I suspect the Research group was responsible for their own site. Even though it has a marketing feel, I suspect it should be held more to an engineering blog type of standard.
I think the limiting factor for this is that the sensor itself is rectangular, pretty much in line with what you're expecting (aspect ratio of image produced, etc).
You could always have a square sensor, but then when shooting landscape pictures, you'd be throwing away a lot of the sensor data. In short, people generally want rectangular photos, and coupled with economics this means that sensors are that shape.
On the extreme end, I guess you could have some kind of rotating lens / sensor, which would automatically keep level.
@mspix Looking forward to using it (Samsung S5). I hit the Send button and noticed some questionable grammar. It reads "Message has been send successfully on your mobile number." I guess it should be "A message has been sent successfully to your mobile number." or something similar.
This is a bit like the beat "quantization" options in music apps, where you tidy up the raw user input. The best result comes when you choose not 100% quantized.
The Pix app needs a slider so you can choose how much stabilisation you want on the target part of the image.
No, I think the same. The Pix photos look a bit washed out. Faces are brighter, but it doesn't look natural to me anymore. I'd rather use a flash for the pictures where faces were really dark, would probably deliver better results.
Definitly not. Two faces, say 5% of the total image are correctly exposed at the expense of the other 95%. If you're serious with photo editing you increase the exposure of the faces afterwards a bit...
They are using face-tracking and stabilisation around the faces in the videos which look's odd to most people because we definitely are not used to seeing this and probably disturbs our brain neurons which have not evolved in any way to compute this..
I know very little about photography. Why do I want such an app. I point and shoot with my S7 Edge and get decent enough pictures. Am I simply not the target audience?
I'm also naively assuming that if I don't particularly like the photo I could do some post processing on it and would rather have the "raw" version.
[also there is pretty much no left margin on the website, Firefox latest on OSX latest]
Slightly off-topic, but this reminds me of Google Camera with the Lens Blur (IIRC) feature. I can't find it on the play store now, was it discontinued? I wouldn't be surprised given it's Google, but why don't just leave the old version there with some sort of warning?
As far as I can tell, the Google Camera app still has this option. Not sure about an iOS version but if they made one I wasn't aware of it. It was actually what I thought of when they mentioned similar functionality in the new iOS camera app.
It might have that option, but it is not available anymore (or I can't find it). This was different from the stock Camera app. If it replaced the stock app, then it's not available for devices that use different Camera app (namely Samsung).
Yeah, sorry. I was referring to the stock, standard "Camera" app I've always used. I even used it when I had a MotoX which included the "Moto Camera" app. I always preferred the plain Google one so that's the one I've used for the past several years.
Looking at the Play store on my old Nexus 5 I don't see it so maybe Moto just included both for some reason or maybe I installed it when it was still in the Play store but has since been discontinued in that incarnation.
This is the version that I have (newer one may need 7.0 according to the comments)
Very cool. Just did a few shots to try it out and the results are definetely nice. Love the smart live picture, and I don't know if it's in my head are real but it feels like it is doing a field of depth if the situation call for one, which is really nice
Ah, Microsoft. Will they ever figure out that the Microsoft name is a liability for consumer app adoption? There's a reason it's not called "Facebook Instagram", and Facebook, deservedly or not, still has a much less tarnished image than MS.
Quite the opposite for me. I'm much more likely to try a cool new app from Microsoft than I am from some random startup I've never heard of. Lots of cool technology innovation going on at Microsoft (yes, really).
Uhmmmm, is Microsoft unaware, that they already have a product call PIX? It's profiler used for DX programming and for X1. So now when you look for some PIX debugging tips on google, you will get results about the photo app.
The camera features are based on technology developed for MS Photosynth (also from Research department, former Live Labs), and originated from research projects from University of Washington.
I had the opposite reaction. I found it humorous that the face detection didn't seem to work reliably (e.g. never detecting the guy in the lower right of the indoor restaurant scene), even in their own demo video.
This is what happens when you make everything an API and try to hide all of the details. People program as the docs tell them to, not realizing that what they're doing requires a hideous amount of complexity under the hood. It is sadly rare for an API to actually mention that a particular method is expensive.
We were referring to the default Camera app that ships with iOS devices. All side-by-sides were shot on the same model of iPhone with the most recent version of iOS at the time of the shoot, as well as the latest version of the Apple Camera app and the latest version of Microsoft Pix app, respectively.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
The Pix-enhanced version:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Sure, the Live Photo version has distracting movement, but it also has much more natural motion in terms of hair flow. And I feel that the camera instability helps give context to the video, that it's some kind of impromptu selfie on a windy day.
The Pix version offers a clearer image at what I feel is a large cost to the image's integrity. It looks a bit creepy. That said, there are probably lots of good situations for Pix's stabilization tech, but that example didn't seem optimal as a landing page demo.