Was this a response to https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid... ?

The Waymo article focused on testing, both physical and virtual. This article just describes the visualization tool that Uber uses to replay SDC logs. They might use the same tool to control and view simulations, but the article doesn't really touch on that.

likely, my bet is that literally every company that does autonomy has a very similar platform that waymo does.

Yep. I believe it was.

I have a serious question. Should this be a web visualization? Doesn't all the abstraction lead to performance hits? Tons of data needs to be pulled off the hard drive, network, RAM and shoved into the graphics card. Is putting a web browser in the middle of that pipeline the most efficient use of resources? I feel like it is a hammer situation.

WebGL may be good enough if you are producing low-res visualizations/interfaces and using the rest of the CPU/GPU to crunch the simulation.

Epic got the Unreal Engine running in-browser with WebGL and asm.js. The stuff Uber is doing isn't anywhere near as graphically intensive as that.

disclaimer: I work at Uber, but not on this project. Also, I used to work on game engines, which have a lot in common with these types of simulators.

Think of the end application: internal tooling. Is it "good enough"?

I am thinking about the end application. All the more reason to ignore all of the benefits of a web solution and spin the highest performance version. Because performance is critical when viewing tons of cameras and lidar with near-realtime playback.

Save and replay is how this data is usually used. Run headless in real time and fancy complex gui upon replay.

That's a reasonable tool. Everybody in self-driving has something similar. Now if they let others look at the data collected by their vehicles, that would be interesting.

see also https://github.com/uber/deck.gl

Great! Now Uber engineers will be able to VR into god view.

Perhaps the phones of people around should record video all the time to improve the view!

Builds the future, meaning builds something Google had N years ago?

Pretty obvious attempt by uber to demonstrate their self-driving abilities to a national audience skeptical of their progress after having been ousted stealing technology secrets from waymo.

In short its propaganda, I have no doubts waymo is light years ahead of the current efforts of uber. Uber is trying to change the public perception in their favor.

Competition is good. I would be really worried if Waymo is the only one demonstrating their visualization capabilities. It also encourages more showcase of technologies which is generally good for the public. SDC has been too secretive of an arm race. You can take sides all you want but I think this move of Uber is one that is beneficial to everyone.

Propaganda is information that isn't objective and is used primarily to influence an audience. Unless you're arguing that all techie blog posts are propaganda, it's hard to understand how this qualifies.

Imagine this was a Show HN by someone else. It would get a lot of praise. So why does that praise turn sour just because it's Uber?

We need a lot more technical articles here and a whole lot less political ones.