World Draw

https://worlddraw.withgoogle.com/explore

by valgaze • 8 years ago

172 120 8 years ago

worlddraw.withgoogle.com

papa_bear• 8 years ago

It's telling me my browser is unsupported and to use Chrome, but I'm using the latest version on Mac. Anyone else getting this? Works on Safari though.

Mononokay2• 8 years ago

Working on Firefox 63.0.3 running on Linux perfectly.

esotericsean• 8 years ago

Working in Chrome on macOS for me.

torarnv• 8 years ago

Seems like a bad version check. I'm running latest Beta (Version 71.0.3578.53 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)) on macOS and seeing the same thing.

chki• 8 years ago

Same for me. Ironically if you click on the "unsupported" link it wants you to install Chrome.

Mononokay2• 8 years ago

Kinda disappointing that the "AI" bit of it is just image recognition.

I thought it was going to be a cool demo on changing 2D drawings to 3D objects.

levesque• 8 years ago

There's probably a project to make here. Take those pixel2pixel models that are able to generate images from drawings, generalize them to 3D, say a pixel2vertex. Would be pretty neat.

The key would be to find a way to constrain the output space so that it's not so vast that it won't be possible to converge to something useful.

azlen• 8 years ago

That would be very interesting, reminds me of an demo a couple years back of sketching buildings and and immediately being translated using procedural shape grammars into 3d.

http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/2016/NGGBB16/

bfdm• 8 years ago

Neat idea, but seems to be limited in user choice.

Tried to draw a couple of things, it picked the closest match, then got stuck on "Finding a place in the world" for me (why can't I pick?).

Also can't seem to draw new things, just pick from the AI guesses, so far as I can tell.

I look forward to poking at the next version.

petetnt• 8 years ago

The graphics are incredibly charming! Would totally play a Sim City / Cities: Skylines etc. type of game with graphics like this and think the drawing controls could be a really nice way of navigating blocks and such on too!

markovbot2• 8 years ago

I'm not really understanding the point of this. I can draw something, then it tries to match it to one of it's cookie cutter things that it knows about, and doesn't seem to use my drawing at all in the final map. So is this just a glorified "thing picker", rather than a big dropdown or something?

Normal_gaussian• 8 years ago

This was my experience.

First I drew a post box that I can (normally) see from my window. It tried to tell me it was a house, and I managed to cancel out by accident in my search for a "not a house" option.

Second I drew a bush with lots of bubbly bits - very mario-esque - but it turned it into a spheroid.

Confusing if this is what was intended; but the UI was pretty.

komali2• 8 years ago

Yea would have been much more pleasant to just type "fence."

I thought I could place it myself, I was going to be an Internet about it and drop a fence right in the middle of this roundabout with like ten buses going around it, but I'm stuck on this "finding a place in the world," so I don't really get the purpose of this app at all.

I have no way to distinguish if I actually am affecting this "world." For all I know someone is just modeling stuff, and when I draw a "fence" it goes and finds a random fence and says "here's the fence you made, yay for you!"

therein• 8 years ago

I have no way to distinguish if I actually am affecting this "world." For all I know someone is just modeling stuff, and when I draw a "fence" it goes and finds a random fence and says "here's the fence you made, yay for you!"

I have a feeling that's exactly what's going on here because I drew a small bush and it said "Thank you, the world needed 4 of those!".

Also take a look at where most of the trees were created at. Shoreline Amphitheatre. :)

jayd162• 8 years ago

Its just a thing they made for the last Google IO to show off their doodle-to-thing ai recognition. So, yeah, the thing picker is the point.

ehsankia• 8 years ago

More specifically, this game:

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

It uses an AI do figure out what you meant from an abstract drawing.

Cacti• 8 years ago

They are using it collect labeled drawing data for future ML training.

nixpulvis• 8 years ago

Quick trigger the botnet to gaslight this training session ;)

lr• 8 years ago

I love how Hollywood gives us futuristic UIs from movies like Iron Man, the Matrix, etc. And then you have Google. They predict a future that looks like...to use another Hollywood reference, The Truman Show.

tehaugmenter• 8 years ago

I tried Firefox and Chrome to see if it was a browser dependency. I tried work and home internet to see if it was a firewall issue.

In the Console if you bring it up you can see the issue. It's unable to connect to the socket it's trying to connect to. So a live bug.

kuanbutts• 8 years ago

Can we all just acknowledge that the "AI" aspect of this is gimmicky and - ignoring that part - Scribblenauts did this way, way better back in like '09?

zeroname9• 8 years ago

Acknowledged. I would say even Scribblenauts might've been actually a better game without this gimmick. It wouldn't have attracted the same amount of attention though.

deft• 8 years ago

This site makes absolutely no sense. Why is there no explanation to what I'm supposed to do and to what is happening? It says it's the "world" but I can barely navigate a small little neighbourhood. I thought I'd be able to explore the whole planet with drawings correlated to the location they're made in. Why does it tell me where people are drawing things from when it really means nothing?

When I finally got around to drawing something, it didn't work. I drew a relatively simple rectangular building and nothing happened. I realized it must be matching based off of things it already knows so I restarted and drew the simplest 3 line car I could. Still nothing. No error, no instructions. Just a trash can and a circular arrow.

This experiment is a failure.

Varcht3• 8 years ago

I don't know, took me a few moments to create a house boat. Experiment is a success?

zeroname9• 8 years ago

You didn't create a house boat. Somebody modeled a house boat, gave it two parameters to slightly tweak it. An ML system was trained to classify scribbles as (among others) a house boat.

You scribbled something that the ML system classified as a house boat. None of the characteristics in your drawing moved over to the model. The only creative part (your scribble) was destroyed.

You could've just typed "house boat" and picked the model from a list. The result would be the same.

fragebogen• 8 years ago

I think that, similarly to earlier projects like https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/, it's a way of obtaining tons of user generated data (scribbles), which are also relatively easy classified.

wbhart• 8 years ago

You move around by dragging the picture from side to side. Not the most intuitive interface, to be sure.

jade-cat2• 8 years ago

The Draw Things section has no way to finalize the drawing. The only buttons are reset and undo.

Also on the world map there's a bunch of bikes that claim to be cars and pickups.

Firefox on Windows.

Varcht3• 8 years ago

If the AI recognizes your drawing it will offer a next step.

jade-cat2• 8 years ago

I tried it on Chrome, and it started recognizing after just one line. On Firefox it never did.

Also, it's sad that your drawing gets discarded as soon as you pick a category.

baumgarn3• 8 years ago

It works completely contrary to what it pretends. There is no creativity and creative collaboration happening here. Everything I draw is turned into a predefined shaped. Everything unique is translated into something generic. I think there is a serious misunderstanding about the value of creativity happening here, and I very much hope this is not the future Google is imagining for us.

fermentation• 8 years ago

This is probably the most dramatic reply I can think of

baumgarn3• 8 years ago

Hahaha, thanks. I remembered this site i used to spend time on where people actually collaborated on weird quilt paintings back around 2000 - now this was a lot of fun. Sadly not functional anymore and only as a gallery http://www.ice.org/tiles/ The paintings might be a bit uglyish, but I prefer them any day to the kind of tech fetishization Google is presenting here.

benatkin• 8 years ago

I've seen withgoogle.com before. withgoogle.com is supposed to invoke collaboration, but with google's reputation as a cold, impersonal corporation where everything is automated and there's hardly ever any technical support, I just mentally shrug it off when I see it.

and we also have abc.xyz and domains.google and other domain shenanigans that I forget about.

I just learned that alphabet.com is different company. I wonder if they've clung to the domain as tightly as nissan.com has clung to theirs or if google doesn't want it that much.

gboudrias2• 8 years ago

Not sure if I understand your comment. Alphabet is google's parent company, allegedly created to assuage the fear of a giant entity by turning it into multiple quite big entities.

rollcat2• 8 years ago

Back in the time when I was working on jobs for Google (they were my employer's client), withgoogle.com was a domain where we hosted things like "über-doodles", all the funky gizmos, etc. It's basically so that they don't run "experimental" / "untrusted" code in the same cookie domain as google.com; same thing goes for googleusercontent.com, where they store user-uploadable media.

It was always my impression that coolproject.withgoogle.com is meant to be understood as "company X made a cool project with Google".

bduerst• 8 years ago

Think of withgoogle.com as an off-google.com domain place for experiments and ad-hoc programs/campaigns. There are still the same privacy and security standards, but a little bit more lax branding rules to allow for more ambitious projects. (Disclaimer: I work in Google and have launched some projects on withgoogle.com)

zeroname9• 8 years ago

Exactly.

I was hoping for something like /r/place.

It's just a demonstration of the impressive but ultimately rather useless "drawing -> shape classification" machine learning application.

It would be massively better if I could just choose from the shape classes and place them myself. That would allow at least for some amount of creativity. Of course then they don't get to show off their gimmick AI...

mav3rick5• 8 years ago

But it's someone else's vision, why does it have to conform to yours ? Also, the classification is super useful for technical flowcharts and designs that can be doodled easily. That's at least one use case.

sieabahlpark• 8 years ago

That's how you get a lot of dicks drawn unfortunately.

zeroname9• 8 years ago

If you can classify houses, trees and boats, you can classify "problematic" things. That would actually be somewhat useful.

In practice though, if somebody wants to deface something, they'll find a way to do it. You can't sacrifice creativity to preventing that.

/r/place has shown that people (or redditors) are cooperative enough to maintain a reasonably "clean" environment, without any form of external moderation.

mav3rick5• 8 years ago

Jeez, it's just a cool demo. If you don't like it don't use it. No one is forcing anyone to use this.

jayd162• 8 years ago

But its not really pretending to be what you're describing. Its just a web toy they made to show off their doodle-to-thing ai with the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map.

PavlovsCat• 8 years ago

"Draw the world together", "Nice! you made a house". Even when Google make a "web toy", they just can't help but ooze infantilization and saying one thing while doing another.

the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map.

The added fun of it being dropped, or dropping it? I don't know, since for me on Firefox, it hung at the "finding a place in the world" stage.

izacus• 8 years ago

Is that the same thing you say when a kid gets LEGO's? It's all predefined shapes anyway, no creativity anywhere.

Why on earth did you write your post? What does your negativity bring to the world?

starbeast• 8 years ago

Lego is a lot more fun when you add hacksaws and p38.

varjag2• 8 years ago

I just wish they'd focus on fixing Gmail instead.

jhall14682• 8 years ago

I'm sure they shut down the entire Gmail organization in order to work on this tool, rather than have a separate engineering team work on it.

This is akin to complaining about bugs in a game when they release new artwork. Artists aren't working the bug queue.

worldsayshi• 8 years ago

Woah, slow down a bit. This feels very much like a toy project with a toy budget that had optimistic ideas about how easy it would be to create something that could be dynamic in an interesting new way.

To think that it somewhat represents future direction of Google seems over the top.

Dynamic creation in the way they are hinting at in the description seems like a very difficult but interesting endeavour that requires a lot of iterating to get anywhere on.

flycaliguy• 8 years ago

I think you are both right. It’s a tech demo which unintentionally perfectly encapsulates a disturbing direction we could slowly evolve into... unintentionally.

This thing could be placed in an art gallery. Visitors submit an original drawing and watch it transform into a cookie cutter contribution, stripping away everything that makes them unique. Its actually a pretty played out concept artistically, the whole “white picket fence” vibe.

tdb7893• 8 years ago

I think it's just how people view large tech companies on this site. The view of those large companies is very negative in general here.

amingilani• 8 years ago

I agree. It promised to let me "draw the world", and then immediately turned all my creative phalluses into mushrooms and trees. What's the point of spending all that making users draw stuff if you're going to replace it with ready-made art? Such a waste of users and traffic.

The things any number of the projects at indiehackers or product hunt could do with the traffic!

wrayjustin• 8 years ago

No matter what I draw, I always end up stuck on the "finding a place in the world" step.

zeroname9• 8 years ago

I guess the world is "full".

Hoasi• 8 years ago

This AI doesn't seem to recognize my drawing...

https://imgur.com/a/fwmUEP6

dummyvariable• 8 years ago

That was a good one!

beaconstudios4• 8 years ago

thank

anonytrary• 8 years ago

Amazing idea! Poor execution. I tried to draw something and it basically reduced to an AI doing an object recognition on what I had drawn, then suggesting me the closest matches from its existing database. I clicked on a match, then was able to change TWO parameters describing the object.

It would have been much more interesting if you could draw something, then have an AI try to guess what it would look like in 3D, then add your model to their database. People could then upvote/downvote models to get rid of crappy results, and the AI could use that information to learn what models it messed up generating.

fredley• 8 years ago

It kind of sucks if you draw something nice, but it can't tell what it is, so that's that.

black-tea• 8 years ago

I tried to draw a church but it didn't recognise it.

This is no more advanced, and waaay less useful than this: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html (which is at least 10 years old at this point).

brian_herman__• 8 years ago

I thought this had something to do with the world chess championship though this is cool too.

Cd00d• 8 years ago

I think it's really weird that you can't draw people or animals. I tried to add a t-rex to the world :(

rollcat2• 8 years ago

This website is optimized for certain browsers and devices.
Please upgrade your browser.

Emphasis mine - I'm on Firefox 63. I can't believe this is still happening in 2018. :(

robocat• 8 years ago

Especially because the corporate ESR version 60 is relevent for about another year (support finishes when Firefox 69 comes out).

markovbot2• 8 years ago

I'm on Firefox 63.0.3 and it worked fine

icebraining3• 8 years ago

Same on 63.0.1.

wokwokwok• 8 years ago

Same thing.

“Works best on chrome” I guess.

asmosoinio2• 8 years ago

I am getting this with Chrome 70.0.3538.102 on Mac.

adzm• 8 years ago

I let my 7 year old play with this; she was able to scribble simple things which were recognized pretty well, actually, and was a fun and useful activity. I think most of HN is not the target audience here, and we are reacting to our assumptions based on the title of the project.

jhall14682• 8 years ago

It's nice to see a single reasonable response here. The entire premise seems to fit a young kid contributing to something, but a bunch of jaded 30 year olds on HN are angry that this tool didn't appeal to them.

beaconstudios4• 8 years ago

HN does tend to get very self-absorbed at times.

air7• 8 years ago

Heck this site doesn't even work with noscript. I'm outta here. /s

SmellyGeekBoy2• 8 years ago

But has anyone claimed that they could build it themselves in a weekend?

nneonneo• 8 years ago

World Draw determines what someone is sketching and turns it into a 3D model in WebGL.

This appears to be highly misleading at best. It appears to be a fancy classifier for 2D drawings, that matches to a database of predesigned slightly-customizable 3D models. There's no real connection between the drawing and the model.

seymour333• 8 years ago

I feel like this essentially exists for the sole purpose of generating a large training set for some sort of drawing analysis.

I wonder if google has some new use case where they want to be able to quickly tag human doodles with their subject matter?

pxtail• 8 years ago

Don't worry, this is simply made for tracking users, first one creates few drawings then his unique drawing style is assigned to profile and voila! now you can be recognized anywhere and everywhere by simply drawing a cat. (-:

40acres• 8 years ago

Reading through these comments is actually kind of hilarious, HN is definitely embracing The Grinch just in time for the holidays.

lostgame2• 8 years ago

Not sure why, but this crawls on Safari, (2013 MBP, 16GB RAM) and demands I update either Chrome or Firefox before it will run, and I generally avoid running the newest version of anything unless completely necessary.

Safari gives me about 4FPS, with nothing else open.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 8 years ago

I generally avoid running the newest version of anything unless completely necessary.

Including your web browser!?

lostgame2• 8 years ago

Especially my web browser, and iOS/MacOS/Windows.

The security issues are not nearly as important to me as the software actually functioning the way I want.

The best security is just not to use Google products to start, I know, but sometimes it's a necessary evil.

I also avoid upgrading Logic Pro / Final Cut Pro like the plague. Apple has a nasty habit of changing minor UI/UX features that really screw with my workflow, even just the way they moved the 'tempo' field in Logic 10.4.

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

I guess it says something that my drawing is so bad it doesn't recognize it as anything? The tool seems oddly non-functional.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

You know those joke UI exercises of "the most terrible way to implement a volume slider" or whatnot? This is basically that.

In order to pick a tree prefab, please draw a tree.

bobthechef• 8 years ago

I don't get it.

emmelaich• 8 years ago

It'd be cool if you create things like in the Scribblenauts game.

Bucephalus355• 8 years ago

An AI Experiment to “draw the world closer together”? While I appreciate this cool technology, it would look like the gushing technoutopianism of say 2010 is still alive and well inside Google despite social unrest across the world. I don’t want to explicitly criticize their optimism, but maybe they should have used a more restrained statement to describe their app?

augbog• 8 years ago

Is it just me or is it so slow?

crystalPalace• 8 years ago

The drawing screen lags a little for me. Kinda hard to draw precisely unless you move very slowly.

nthnclrk• 8 years ago

Surely everyone else just sees this as a scaled way to keep training Google's machine learning models, right?

sidcool• 8 years ago

A lot of cynicism in comments. Seems like an innocuous experiment. Cool graphics. Average experience. But built on the web, that's important. Let's not conspiracy theories get the better of us.

mohancy• 8 years ago

Slightly the lot of changes regularly impacting the world like technology day by day change, some predictions for the near-future of artificial intelligence.

tartoran4• 8 years ago

It's drawing only cactuses?? I didn't know I could draw cactuses so well

asmosoinio2• 8 years ago

This website is optimized for certain browsers and devices. Please upgrade your browser.

... which? Getting this with Chrome 70.0.3538.102 on Mac.

Illniyar• 8 years ago

Seems like a great way to get training data for image recognition (or whatever the term that applies). Kudos google.

hummingurban• 8 years ago

okay be honest...how many of you tried drawing a penis?

b199• 8 years ago

I'm guessing the suggested items are the ones hard to differ. Analytics and explanation of patterns to the machine if you ask me.

They just keep pushing out stuff for the same reason on and on

2474• 8 years ago

Well apparently they haven't modeled the Death Star yet... Turns out the closest thing to a Death Star is a bush.

World Draw

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