autocratic for the people.

How Hard Could It Be, Part 1.

Back in August, Apple finally revealed some of the insanely great features coming in the next release of Mac OS X (10.5, aka "Leopard"). Since it's now the end of October – oops, btw – the hype train has finally cleared the station, the Internets have returned to normal, and it's time to assess the new stuff.

The Leopard vibe from the end-user perspective is mild disappointment, and understandably so: although Time Machine is neat in an eat-your-vegetables sort of way, there isn't much else that really pops. That shocks and awes. I mean, seriously: email stationery? If anything, I'd call that a step backwards.

But Wired magazine aside, it's actually perfectly fine that the demonstrated Leopard features didn't rock the globe. After all, the demo was given at WWDC. The World Wide Developer Conference. The annual gathering of people who write software for OS X. Is it any surprise that, of the ten features shown, six* were aimed squarely at the nerd patrol?

To get the real story, listen to the applause in the streaming video of the presentation: there was a lot of neat stuff that the MSIATM** missed, stuff that hasn't been possible before but that doesn't necessarily seem that spectacular to the average user. In fact, there was one thing in particular that completely blew me away, and seemed to cause quite a bit of applause at the event: live background replacement in a webcam image.

You are no doubt familiar with the concept of bluescreening: it's what the weatherman uses every day on the news, wherein he stands in front of a blue wall in the studio, yet appears as if he's standing in front of an animated weather map. Well, background replacement algorithms produce the same effect, only they don't need a blue wall to do it. Instead, they try to figure out what part of the image is background, and what part is foreground. Using math.

As you might imagine, that's both neat and tricky to pull off, which is why no one's really offered it yet in a mass market application. It was therefore extremely impressive that the new version of iChat seemed to be able to do it flawlessly (and without any choppiness – check the streaming video right around 1:19:00 for the demo). The wild applause is well earned: that's a hell of a nice implementation.

Of course, upon viewing that I immediately concluded that there must be a trick. I mean, they're doing it in real time, on a noisy webcam image. There's gotta be some new algorithm, or some different technique. How hard could it be?

And that's how, head firmly in ass, I set off to prove that background replacement isn't hard. And learned, of course, that in fact it is hard. You probably saw that coming.

(To be continued.)





* Those six being Spaces, Spotlight upgrades, iCal upgrades, Accessibility upgrades, 64-bit UI libraries, and Core Animation.

** Main Stream Internet and Technology Media. Obviously.

posted by avixe @ 11:36 PM