Are You Sure? The Video Footage Says Otherwise.

October 12, 2010 1:25 PM

Software, and Instant Real-Time 1-Click Commissar Removal: In the old days, photographic purges were laborious and time-consuming. Modern software has of course made this process much faster, and now this important task can be applied to video, and in real-time. Of course, if you don't want to actually remove someone or something, but instead simply want to turn ordinary men into Heroes of the Revolution and vixens into forgettable faces in the crowd, well, that too is an option.
posted by darth_tedious (18 comments total)

From now on all suspected dissidents must stand very still against an even surface at all times!
posted by Artw at 1:31 PM on October 12, 2010

From now on all suspected dissidents must stand very still against an even surface at all times!
And if they can wear their own blindfold too, that would save a lot of time.
posted by Electric Dragon at 1:35 PM on October 12, 2010 [3 favorites]

Forget politics, the next step is *replacing* those objects with sponsored product placement. The tech is mostly here for pre-rendered video, so combine it with this real-time stuff and pretty soon videos will have objects dropped in tailored to your buying preferences.
posted by bonaldi at 1:35 PM on October 12, 2010 [2 favorites]

I         see the value in this and         think it is the wave of the future.
posted by mazola at 1:36 PM on October 12, 2010 [4 favorites]

Isn't the issue these days the fact that we have cached copies of the originals floating around, and people are likely to save copies for themselves if they think it's relevant?

I mean, Lifehacker just ran an article saying that it takes 16 months for a picture deleted from Facebook to disappear from the internet. They try to spin it as Facebook's fault, but a lot of it is just that there are a lot of spiders and other robots that keep records of everything they find.
posted by mccarty.tim at 1:40 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

They used Baywatch as an example and never changed the Breast Girth setting? What a tease.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 1:44 PM on October 12, 2010 [2 favorites]

"Diminished Reality: Your Imagination is the Limit" is a rather... Orwellean concept, no?
posted by 8dot3 at 2:00 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Diminished Reality: When You Want it to Disappear... and it is lighter and smaller than its surroundings.
posted by muddgirl at 2:10 PM on October 12, 2010

...and also you don't move your camera around too much.
posted by muddgirl at 2:10 PM on October 12, 2010

Fox News must be drooling about this.
posted by Skeptic at 2:10 PM on October 12, 2010

Those researchers sure went to a lot of effort to avoid cleaning their desks.
posted by mazola at 2:13 PM on October 12, 2010

Isn't the issue these days the fact that we have cached copies of the originals floating around, and people are likely to save copies for themselves if they think it's relevant?

The real kicker isn't editing video that other people have uploaded, it's controlling video streams as they come through in realtime. One by one, old reliables like photo, audio, and video have crumbled as trustworthy measures of "What Actually Happened." Realtime video feeds were a bit like the 128-bit encryption key of trustworthy media, and we've finally got the processing power and algorithms to make them malleable.
posted by verb at 2:21 PM on October 12, 2010 [2 favorites]

Is this really so easy? All these demos seem like sales pitches rather than explorations of the software's strengths and limitations. I'd like to see some failure cases and explanations of what difficulties the software still has.
posted by benzenedream at 2:57 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hacked AR glasses which cancel out corporate logos would be kinda cool...
posted by yoHighness at 4:38 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is this really so easy?
It appears so. According to the first video, all you have to do is: ....Increase the quality...Improve the result a few times.
posted by sanko at 4:44 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

At last! I can finally get rid of those commissars cluttering up my vacation photos!
posted by Bromius at 6:27 PM on October 12, 2010 [2 favorites]

Hacked AR glasses which cancel out corporate logos would be kinda cool...

"Cayce Pollard, the optometrist will see you now..."

See also: Julian Oliver's work. (Direct links to video for Artvertising Berlin, using Julian Oliver’s “Billboard Interception Unit”, Oliver’s presentation at TEDx Rotterdam.)
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 9:36 AM on October 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

The book linked from the Wikipedia article (info copied below) is fascinating reading about the old-days photo-shoppe-ing. Lots of good examples, information on techniques, and background on the political situations that led to the people being wiped out.

King, David, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia
posted by whatzit at 10:08 AM on October 13, 2010