It’s very easy to create cheap, “high-tech” looking graphics using random shapes and lines intersecting. Browse any stock photography website, and they abound. But they don’t do anything to raise the level of visual interest, or communicate more deeply. These elegant System Aesthetics by London based studio FIELD, are on a whole different level. Designed for Wired’s The World in 2018, these complex, intricate graphics have a lot going for them, with sharp, nuanced shapes creating concepts of self-driving cars, AI, and digital crypto currency. Check out each graphic’s description to get a sense of how design and technology are converging to create our very fast-paced future. Via Behance:
How Self-Driving Cars See The World – To navigate the world safely, autonomous vehicles must build a picture of it. To do this, an algorithm integrates real-time feeds from a multitude of sensors including video, infrared, radar and ultrasound. It then passes that data through up to 150 processing stages and filters informed by prior learning. This image is based on Inception, Google’s image recognition model, and shows the inputs (on the right) being pulled in and processed (top left) into a model of the road ahead. Other vehicles are represented by the red boxes.
Face Hackers – In 2017, researchers at the University of Washington managed to generate a believable video of President Obama, using only a forged audio recording – and a neural network trained on his public speeches. The lip sync is nearly perfect, and the possibilities of abuse are alarming. How much longer will we be able to trust what we see on camera? This artwork, generating Obama’s likeness from a multitude of software modules, illustrates the way a neural network learns how different sounds corresponds to the movement of lips, eyes and cheeks in minute detail.
Image Creation – Algorithms receive feedback from humans to help them improve – but AI researchers are excited by generative adversarial networks. Previously thought impossible, the idea is to pit two machine learning programs against each other — one to create something, the other to act as critic. Amazon is testing an application in which networks analyse images and then create similar ones. Although they can currently only create tiny images, the technique mights one day be used in film-making.
Following The Money Trail – With initial coin offerings attracting attention and governments testing their own cryptocurrencies, digital money will continue to grow in influence in 2018. This image depicts transactions in Ethereum, an open-source computing system that allows developers to create blockchain-based applications. Each square represents a line in the distributed ledger that makes up a blockchain, with each following on from the last. The squares’ colours are determined by the amount of money that is being moved.
The Next Generation of Voice Assistants – Personal assistants like Alexa, Siri and Cortana will get even smarter in 2018. A computer science breakthrough called ‘dynamic program generation’ will allow them to understand more complex instructions and even the “intent” of the input. They will provide responses that tap into functionality and data from all apps you use on your connected devices. This illustration shows the natural language processing algorithm SyntaxNet, you can see the voice input in the form a soundwave coming in at the bottom layer. It is parsed into phonemes, and then processed across multiple, dynamically re-arranging layers to extract the user’s request and form a response.