Hacker Cinema
Stranger Than Fiction
2006 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Marc Forster
Harold Crick is a lonely IRS agent whose mundane existence is transformed when he hears a mysterious voice narrating his life.
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7 comments on Hacker News
I have a degree in Computer Vision, and, whether Pickle is lying about various capabilities or not, this guy is talking completely out of his ass and a whole lot of what he says is just extremely idiotic.
> tracking blah blah 6DoF blah blah IMU
This whole section is just wildly false. Tracking like shown in the video is easily done with just a camera, 1980s-era corner feature detection, and basic fucking geometry. People have been doing far more complex and stable motion tracking with no more input than single camera video for literally decades. And this device doesn't just have a camera; it has two HD stereoptic cameras, so they also get a depth map. You can absolutely do what they show with the hardware that Pickle claims is in the glasses.
(If you want a fantastic example, see the intro sequence to the movie Stranger Than Fiction from 2006.)
> It would take time to affix an open source SLAM pipeline and even more for them to build their own.
And this is a complete non sequitur, as SLAM is also not needed for what they show in the video.
> blah blah This would indicate either the software is using real-time depth tracking blah blah
The glasses have fucking binocular cameras in them!
> But in the photos of Pickle 1, there is no sign of any spot to charge the device.
There is zero reason whatsoever to believe that those images are photos of the final product and not renders or props. It's like he's never seen marketing material before.
This guy's LinkedIn bio says "Aug 2022 - Mar 2023: Attended UVA as a first year studying economics and commerce before dropping out to build in VR full time." So it seems he's a child with zero background training. That explains a lot tbh.
I think the phrase “stranger than fiction” is commonly used for this.
That is also the title of a pretty funny movie.
Along the lines of "comedians doing well in dramatic roles in good movies" I have to throw in 2006's "Stranger Than Fiction" with Will Ferrell.
Using Stranger Than Fiction as an example in this paper rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it also accounts for about a third of the conclusion.
I like that movie, but it doesn't really add anything to the paper and even if it does I feel like this is the equivalent of saying "In Harry Potter a boy finds out he's special and goes on a magical adventure. Can we all find out we are special?"
It's more rhetoric than academic.
If you've ever seen the movie Stranger Than Fiction, which is cutesy but good graded on the curve for cutesy movies, that's the narrative mood DFW seems to be going for: the detached narrator who is not in fact entirely detached. The third person perspective is often meant to be partially ironic, as is (when he uses it) the first person.
Slightly different purpose, but nicely executed way of showing texts and data in a movie was Stranger than Fiction (2006) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420223/.
> 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