New algorithms produce patterns that could hide eyesores in public places | Hacker News Reader

New algorithms produce patterns that could hide eyesores in public places

newsoffice.mit.edu

31 pointsjcr10 comments

Some considerations by watching the video in the post.

I think testing stills with fixed lighting is pointless: once the light starts flickering through the foliage, or the time of the day changes this things will become very obvious.

Note how the video is not really a video, but a series of morphed stills, I'm sure that a moving viewer and binocular vision will make those things much more obvious.

Why not just get them painted by some artist? Make them beautiful instead of trying to camouflage them.

It's even worse than that. The cubes are generated and overlaid on the image based on textures from the images. In other words, the lighting from the scene on a real textured cube would look nowhere near as good as what it is shown.

Just consider that the cubes in these images leave no shadows or affect ambient occlusion, nor are they self-shadowed.

The article and problem is interesting in itself, but the portrayal of how effective this would be in real life is greatly exaggerated.

>Why not just get them painted by some artist?

Over here in Germany they do this in quite some cities:

http://frankkoebsch.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/bemalte-trafoha...

http://www.juliusbaasner.com/architektur.php?projekt=1

http://www.appolloart.com/2014/04/28/stadtwerke-bernau-liebe...

One can debate how beautiful the results turned out but some painted transformer stations or communications boxes gave me a smile upon seeing them here in Berlin.

Living in Taiwan this was also the first thought that came to my head: Isn't there already an efficient, sympathetic, and good solution to this problem?

Painted Box (Taiwan): http://bit.ly/1if5VOb

Painted Boxes (World): http://www.ettoday.net/news/20130828/262333.htm

Painted Boxes (London): http://www.fundesign.tv/view.php?aid=3893

I would much rather see a mural that offers a reprieve from its surroundings than to at some point realise the concrete ugliness I'm staring at is simply a facade created to ensure my vision of any concrete ugliness is not, in fact, obscured.

Reminds me of the painted high rises in Prague:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Jahodov%C...

Just painting harsh concrete architecture with some simple patterns can make it a lot more pleasant and humane.

I think the point isn't to try to hide the objects, but make it blend in. I agree with your points about lighting and video edits BUT., I believe even if they can maintain a modest fraction of this effect in real life, the impact and application of this will be huge. You don't need to not be able to tell it's there at all for it to improve the aesthetic dramatically.

Agreed.

Also, unless these public-space eyesores are in the desert, tundra, or on open ocean, you have the problem of seasonal foliage changes. Not to mention snow.

Neat visual effect though, and there are certainly good applications for the tech -- but I'm going to say that "public eyesores" ain't one.

Seems like it might make people more likely to run into camouflaged obstacles (particularly those vision-impaired). Imagine running through a park at night with camouflaged electrical boxes.

I heavily agree with painting artwork on them. A few blocks away, there is a painted electrical box that I have become quite attached to.

Military camouflage is more obvious application. As others pointed out we don't really want things in public space to be invisible.

At the bottom of the article is a link to the paper, but on the project website (also linked) there is a "High Resolution" version of the paper:

http://andrewowens.org/papers/2014_camo_hires.pdf

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