mirror mirror on the wall

Last November, I mentioned an app that makes you look like you are wearing a makeup when you do a teleconference. Now Panasonic lets you take it a step further. A new mirror analyzes the skin on your face and prints out a makeup that you can apply directly to your face.

The aim of the Snow Beauty Mirror is “to let people become what they want to be,” said Panasonic’s Sachiko Kawaguchi, who is in charge of the product’s development. “Since 2012 or 2013, many female high school students have taken advantage of blogs and other platforms to spread their own messages,” Kawaguchi said. “Now the trend is that, in this digital era, they change their faces (on a photo) as they like to make them appear as they want to be.”

When one sits in front of the computerized mirror, a camera and sensors start scanning the face to check the skin. It then shines a light to analyze reflection and absorption rates, find flaws like dark spots, wrinkles, and large pores, and offer tips on how to improve appearances.

But this is when the real “magic” begins. Tap print on the results screen and a special printer for the mirror churns out an ultrathin, 100-nanometer makeup-coated patch that is tailor-made for the person examined. The patch is made of a safe material often used for surgery so it can be directly applied to the face. Once the patch settles, it is barely noticeable and resists falling off unless sprayed with water.

The technologies behind the patch involve Panasonic’s know-how in organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), Kawaguchi said. By using the company’s technology to spray OLED material precisely onto display substrates, the printer connected to the computerized mirror prints a makeup ink that is made of material similar to that used in foundation, she added.

Read the full article by Shusuke Murai in the Japan Times News.

Panasonic Corp. engineer Masayo Fuchigami displays an ultrathin makeup patch during a demonstration of the Snow Beauty Mirror on Dec. 1 in Tokyo. | Shusuke Murai

App adds makeup to faces on video conferences

In a potential boost for the government’s drive to get more people telecommuting, cosmetics company Shiseido Co. has developed an app that makes users look as if they are wearing makeup. It amounts to an instant makeover for the unfortunate worker called to appear on screen from home at an awkward hour.

Read the article in the Japan Times.

How great companies die

We all know of great companies that have gone under. When we are teenagers and have a flourishing phantasy coupled with still little real world experience, we often develop conspiracy theories of evil conglomerates destroying great companies. This is reflected in the American tradition of siding with the underdog and buying goods from the second largest company.

Location, location, location

Today, many conglomerates are not run by visionaries but by gnomes toting spreadsheets. The key factor for success is then the objective function being optimized by the model. More often than not, the objective function is cost minimization.

Because there are still substantial salary differences around the world, but all scientists are equally dumb (otherwise they would all work in the financial industry), it boils down to location. You can convince yourself of this by driving around the research parks of the Silicon Valley: it looks more and more like Bodie, although some optimistic realtors still leave up the "for lease" signs. The research labs moved from Palo Alto to Beijing, and from there to the Amazon. Who knows where the objective function will send them next.

Unless, somebody uses a different objective function. On 30 April 2010, Disney opened a new research lab in the most expensive city in the world: Zürich in Switzerland, joining companies like IBM and Google, who also have research labs there. Obviously, they concluded that the best location is not the one with the lowest wages, but the one with the sharpest brains, all in a fertile eco-system.

The story began four years ago: Disney's new CEO Robert Iger and Edwin Catmull, chief of the Pixar animation studios that belong to Disney since early 2006, decided to perform more research in house. Through Joe Marks, ETH professor Markus Gross prepared the winning proposal for a joint venture between ETH and Disney.

Disney is paying the high Swiss salaries, while the ETH is contributing the infrastructure. This includes the building at Clausiusstrasse 47. The created intellectual property and their licensing fees will be shared between ETH and Disney. At the opening April 30, Disney Research Zurich started with 20 researchers, which will grow to 40 by 2011.

In the portrait above, Prof. Markus Gross is holding cheap 3-D goggles, but the agenda for Disney Research Zurich goes much further than that. For example, part of the eco-system in Zurich is a small company selling a mobile autosteroscopic video player the size of a paperback for just 400 francs. This video player presents 3-D movies without the spectator wearing special glasses.

Not far from Disney Research Zurich, near the city zoo, is FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, who is organizing the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. Disney's ESPN sports channel has announced that is will broadcast the Johannesburg games in 3-D. This will bring big financial opportunities for owners of virtual sky boxes around the world.

One especially hard problem in presenting 3-D contents on a 2-D surface is vergence, and this is one of the areas being researched at the new laboratory, for now with Swiss cows:

HDTV: To calibrate or not to calibrate

The January 2009 issue of SID's Information Display has an interesting article by Pete Putman with title To Calibrate, or Not to Calibrate? Mr. Putman is an expert on TV calibration who since its inception has held the ISF (Imaging Science Foundation) certification for this specialty.

The article has some interesting conclusions that can save you a lot of time and money. For example, if you have just basic cable service and a red-laser DVD player, an HDTV with 720p/768p resolution is more than adequate.

As for calibration, it is only really necessary for home-theater front projectors. Today's direct view HDTVs are so good, that all you have to do is to choose the correct factory image presets, such as low-level Cinema and Movie modes.

In summary, here are the five quick steps to set up your HDTV:

1. Set the HDTV's contrast between 60 and 80 and brightness between 50 and 60.
2. Switch from "Dynamic" to "Standard" or "Cinema/ Movie" picture mode.
3. Select a warm-color-temperature preset.
4. Turn down the sharpness control to 20% or less.
5. Turn off any other edge-enhancement processing. (Think about it: Why would HDTV content need detail enhancement?)

This is for your HDTV. As a color scientist you still need to regularly calibrate your monitors and printers.

Thank you, SID and Mr. Putman!

Colored geese

When I did my first steps in image processing, researching new algorithms was not for the faint of heart. First you had to be a maestro programmer (a.k.a. wizard) because to get the algorithm to run with a usable performance on a sub MHz processor with 64K bytes of memory you had to write a paging algorithm to fit it all in memory and code the inner loops in octal code so not to miss any clock cycles and work directly on the barrel shifter. You also had to stick an exception handler at the beginning of the boot loader to catch processor faults and get a chance at debugging your algorithm.

A first quantum leap happened when Photoshop came out, because you could first try out things interactively, then you could write a plug-in with your algorithm.

The next quantum leap happened with MatLab, which contains well programmed image processing libraries that allow you to quickly implement your algorithm expressing it as a linear algebra problem.

A new quantum leap is happening now with Mathematica, which now allows images as parameters, contains an image processing library, and gives you the full power of symbolic computing. Read more about it in this blog post by Theodore Gray. [Click the image to view the movie.]

Many thanks to Don O'Shea for the pointer.

Social Signal Processing

From Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Tuss we know the importance of punctuation and that occasionally it can be a matter of life and death. However, in some cases punctuation cannot come to our rescue.

Such is the case for social signal processing or SSP. We all know what signal processing is, namely the analysis, interpretation, and manipulation of signals. (Incidentally, in our case the signals of interest are color images.) So is social signal processing a European form of socialized processing of images, like social medicine?

In social signal processing the adjective is not social but social signal — it is about the processing of social signals. What makes this confusing is that many of the researchers in this area are signal processing experts. In view of this, the alternate name of social signals understanding is maybe more appropriate.

SSP is concerned with the machine analysis of social behavior. It is a branch of interactive multimodal information management and studies non-verbal behavioral cues and social behavior. Recently SSPNET, a new Network of Excellence funded under work programme topic ICT-2007.2.2 of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, has been funded.

Just imagine yourself one day sitting in front of a financial advisor to talk about your retirement savings and consulting an application on your smart-phone that can assess if you are talking to a snake in a suit…

Cinema al fresco

Our yearly heat wave is coming, with temperatures predicted to reach 30º C in Palo Alto. A popular escape is to hit the road for the foggy beaches, but with the concomitant 4^th of July holiday, staying at home may be a safer choice. Here is an HP way to weather the heat wave at home…

A favorite spot to stay cool is to hide in an air conditioned movie theater. However, since the beginning of cinematography, in Mediterranean countries it has been popular to enjoy movies al fresco in the gran piazza. You may have seen it in Cinema Paradiso or you may even have attended the famous International Film Festival in Locarno, which celebrates its 60^th birthday this year.

Here in the Silicon Valley quite a few people own portable video projectors they use to give presentations when they are on the road visiting customers. On hot evenings many of them check out a movie at the library and enjoy it with their families in the back yard.

The latest latest news story on HP Labs' Web site teaches you how HP technology allows you einjoy your al fresco movies in grand style, on a 16-foot screen and with bright vivid colors. HP Labs' Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata had a hunch they could make a cheap projection system by combining the outputs of several smaller projectors to create a single, high-quality image.

Essentially you invite a dozen friends who own an HP display projector and have them bring their projectors along. All you do is then is to use your HP digital camera to gang together all the projectors using a version of HP's resolution enhancement technology, and voilà, you can flood your 16-foot screen with the combined photons of all the projectors.

Here is the link again, and do not forget the ice cream!