Hacker Cinema
Sight
2023 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Andrew Hyatt
Ming Wang is an impoverished Chinese prodigy who flees Communist China to become a pioneering eye surgeon in America. When tasked with restoring the sight of an orphan in India, who was blinded by her stepmother, Wang must confront the trauma of living through the violent uprising in his youth, the Cultural Revolution.
7 positive1 mixed2 neutralfrom 10 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
11 comments on Hacker News
Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped off so many other people's original designs and IP in their patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation?
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmented-reality-patent-art-copied-designers
>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs
>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...
>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.
>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."
>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-concepts-1682716916
>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts
>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.
>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.
>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
>This might also look familiar: [...]
The incompetence, and the rampant sexism, and of course the blatant dishonesty and deception in their faked demos. Not to mention the way they ripped off other people's ideas in their patents and didn't give them credit.
I posted this earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726144
There was some overlap, and both had lots of "Magic" hype, but there were some really great people working at General Magic, and not nearly as high a level of narcissistic bullshit and self aggrandization and utterly dishonest marketing as from Magic Leap. I mean, come on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209363
The whole point of the lawsuit was all about how Magic Leap's company culture and product plans and demos and self image all revolved around adolescent male egos and sexist fantasies, and excluded women. Tannen Cambell, who filed the lawsuit, was actually hired for the express purpose of solving Magic Leap's recognized "pink/blue problem", but was rebuffed and ignored. They knew they had a problem, and even gave it a name, but they refused to solve it.
Read the lawsuit:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discrimination.pdf
>Campbell, one of whose responsibilities was to help Magic Leap with the “pink/blue problem,” had to endure hostile environment sex discrimination while proposing ways, not only to make Magic Leap’s product more woman friendly, but also to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. Campbell was terminated after (and because) she, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who blurted out that the Emperor was naked, challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct an gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars. Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were “aspirational,” and not Magic Leap’s version of “alternate facts.”
Did all of that suddenly change after the lawsuit was settled?
Because if it did suddenly tangibly change, then that might be evidence that settling a sex discrimination lawsuit by changing their behavior was a positive signal.
But if they only forked over a big pile of hush money, signed non-disparagement agreements and gag orders, and went their separate ways, and Magic Leap didn't actually change their culture, then I don't think you could consider it positive sign or a constructive settlement for anyone other than the woman who was paid to keep her mouth shut.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209469
Fortunately we can all read the details of this particular case in the lawsuit, enabling us to more fairly and easily make a judgement call.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discrimination.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209432
How about this, it sounds like harassment to me:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discrimination.pdf
>Campbell met September 28, 2016 with Magic Leap CFO Henry and Head of Operations Tina Tuli for a conference call with the CFO and leadership team at R/GA, an award-winning international advertising agency that was Magic Leap’s advertising agency of record. During the call, Henry said of the product under development, “I’m sitting here between two beautiful ladies. They’re not going to want to put a big ugly device over their pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don’t want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly things on their faces.” Later, one of the male R/GA executives on the call asked Campbell if Henry frequently made sexist comments like he had made. A female executive at R/GA also was offended by Henry’s remarks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209441
How would you describe this one?
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discrimination.pdf
>As an example of more egregious comments, Campbell told Abovitz of the “Three Os” incident and Vlietstra’s lack of any meaningful discipline in response. As an example of unconscious bias, she told him of an IT employee who was helping Campbell a new logo into the email system. Cognizant that she was taking up a lot of the employee’s time with minor changes to get the logo “perfect,” Campbell apologized for taking up so much of the employee’s time, to which he responded, “Oh, don’t worry, I get it. You’re a woman and you care that things look pretty. I’m a man. I just get the work done.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209424
Would you consider this discrimination or harassment?
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discrimination.pdf
>Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women, how to use Magic Leap’s IT equipment and resources. One woman asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson responded, “Yeah, women always have trouble with computers.” The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209452
This one sounds like discrimination to me:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discrimination.pdf
>Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive advantage to products like Microsoft’s Hololens. Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209567
Like the way Magic Leap picked up so many other people's literal designs and IP in their patent applications?
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmented-reality-patent-art-copied-designers
>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs
>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...
>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.
>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."
>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-concepts-1682716916
>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts
>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.
>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.
>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
>This might also look familiar: [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14312061
The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic":
http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/
It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic.
"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.
Also see "Sight", another short film with a similar premise: https://vimeo.com/46304267
Sounds like a great start for a dystopian sci-fi novel. Just imagine the effect it will have on our social habits when we start avoiding people that our Google Lens HUD marks as non-trusted. It doesn't even need to happen in a malicious way. All you need is the contrast between the people marked "green" and those you haven't added to your trust list.
The short movie "Sight" is a great demonstration of our potential near future of augemented reality technology and the effect it might have on our social lives: http://vimeo.com/46304267
Focusing on gaming in my response here...
I think the next "Big Thing" is that we are going to start moving more and more toward Augmented Reality (AR) [1] and Virtual Reality (VR) [2].
Thoughts:
1. Look for gaming to start heading in the direction of VR with technology like Oculus Rift [3]. Also, with someone of the caliber of John Carmack [4] involved, with not only his passion and skill, but his ability to work with graphics hardware manufacturers and driver developers to effect change and garner the necessary support and backing, expect to see vibrant, compelling developments in this field.
Here is a video of John discussing some of his VR work. It is from E3 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg
2. Look to see more games like Ingress [5] as things start to move toward AR.
3. I realize that this may be an extreme, perhaps well-into-the-future example, but check out this short film entitled, Sight. It is not difficult to imagine that this is where we are heading with technology like Google Glass (e.g., Note in the film the gamification of things like cooking and dating. Personally, the dating part is scary.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_cdkpazjI
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_%28game%29
I think that when it comes to "the Google contact lenses dystopia" there is no better comment than a short movie "Sight" http://vimeo.com/46304267. (It starts with gamification of cucumber cutting.)
nice illustration of a practical use for the graph search. definitely chilling though. Very much reminds me of the Sight short film: http://vimeo.com/46304267
Computer vision, and augmented reality.
Real-time 3d reconstruction from simple video is currently possible with desktop computing power. I suspect that within 5 years it'll be possible with mobile computing power (note that the real dependency here is power efficiency). Obviously textured light techniques are even more powerful.
With projects like Glass and Myo, wearable computing is coming together.
We have the conceptual pieces we need to do useful augmented reality. Start by modelling lots of the world, both the geometry and also object categorization (the latter, admittedly, is still evolving fuzzily). Then build an app framework, for apps to help people execute tasks. One obvious example is step-by-step overlay instructions for doing repairs (changing your own car oil isn't that hard, right, but it's too intimidating for many people).
I think the short film Sight gets it mostly right, except I'm not talking about cybernetic augmentation, only wearable computing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFiE82Npbn4
There's lots of potential there.
Re: Datecasting
This was addressed in the short film called Sight:
http://vimeo.com/m/46304267
It was really well done for a small budget.
> using people's words against them is a problem with or without perfect recall
Yes, it is! But one thing I've learned in managing online communities is that you don't give people the ability to do something you don't want them to do. I don't feel having perfect electronic recall should be a feature without more context sensitivity.
> For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does
Except for the Steve Mann argument: it's a prosthesis. When you take the hardware away from him, you're disabling him. He becomes disoriented and cannot function as well. It's like taking away a wheelchair, or crutches, or a hearing aid. And when more and more of your potential employees rely on these devices 18 hours a day, more and more will be negatively impacted. No, I think it's something that has to be fixed in the legal system or fixed in the entire design of a wearable system.
> Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein
The novel "Snow Crash" has wearable computing used only by a subset of wired individuals derisively called "gargoyles." Everyone else still uses workstations.
The "Old Man's War" series of books has soldiers with embedded computers, including a subset of soldiers who have them embedded since birth.
The novel "Permanence" also has them, but used for pervasive IP rights enforcement.
The novel "Signal to Noise" has an elite intellectual class with implants that work with pervasive wireless sensors and fully immersive workstations.
The film "Stranger Than Fiction" has AR-style overlays at least during the opening sequences.
The short film "Sight" touches on AR and behavorial control a bit: http://vimeo.com/46304267
This kottke.org piece covers a few other shorts: http://kottke.org/12/04/the-real-google-glasses
There are plenty of positives in the film — the cool flightsim, the lack of need for a physical TV, help with cooking... heck, the dating app was even helping improve the dude's love life up until he revealed he used it at the end. I think the point is that these helpful augmentations, taken too far, become harmful.
But if we really want to improve the world, I like the counter in the fridge telling you how many days each food will stay good. That could be enhanced. What if, when you know you have too many zucchinis, you could click a 'share' button and instantly offer them to friends in your apartment building, so they end up in a neighbor's stir-fry and not the trash? Or let Sight predict your cooking habits for the next week based on past behavior, so when you're shopping, it can beep, put a red outline around the zucchini and say "recommend not buying - likely to rot before use." This kind of tech could seriously reduce food waste, which is a big deal in the developed world. I don't have a citation on hand for how much food gets thrown away in the US, but I believe it's over 25 percent.