
World Draw - valgaze
https://worlddraw.withgoogle.com/explore
======
markovbot
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?

~~~
komali2
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
> 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. :)

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deft
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.

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

~~~
zeroname
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.

~~~
mav3rick
And yet just doodling something raw and having something presentable come out
is way more fun than choosing stuff from drop down menus. Everyone is wired
differently and this may not work for you but may work for others.

Why even have a GUI why not a CLI which parses a config file that says "house
boat".

~~~
zeroname
> And yet just doodling something raw and having something presentable come
> out is way more fun than choosing stuff from drop down menus.

It's fun for thirty seconds, after which it is just tedious. If you actually
want to "get stuff done", like building a toy city, you will want the menu
that shows you what's actually available.

> Why even have a GUI why not a CLI which parses a config file that says
> "house boat".

Because that's obviously a bad interface as well. It's not like scribbly
interfaces are the next step of evolution in human-computer-interaction.
They're gimmicks. You're not going to go to Amazon.com and start scribbling
something you want to buy. You'll type it in.

~~~
KeepFlying
Overall I agree with you. And I'm pretty disappointed with this experiment
page. The previous ones were better for sure.

But to your Amazon example, doodles might be the new best way to find "that
thing with the stick out the top and the bell looking thing at the bottom. I
forget what it's called"

I'm glad Google is playing around with this. This one though just feels flat
compared to the others.

------
adzm
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.

~~~
jhall1468
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.

~~~
air7
Heck this site doesn't even work with noscript. I'm outta here. /s

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baumgarn
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.

~~~
benatkin
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.

~~~
gboudrias
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.

~~~
gpm
Alphabet, the owner of alphabet.com appears to be some sort of fleet (as in
company car) management service, unrelated to Alphabet the owner of Google.

~~~
gboudrias
Right, I see. Thank you for the clarification.

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kuanbutts
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?

~~~
zeroname
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.

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

[https://imgur.com/a/fwmUEP6](https://imgur.com/a/fwmUEP6)

~~~
dummyvariable
That was a good one!

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anonytrary
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.

------
rollcat
> 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. :(

~~~
markovbot
I'm on Firefox 63.0.3 and it worked fine

~~~
icebraining
Same on 63.0.1.

------
bfdm
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.

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

~~~
zeroname
I guess the world is "full".

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seymour333
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
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. (-:

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Mononokay
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
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
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/](http://www-
sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/2016/NGGBB16/)

------
sidcool
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.

------
papa_bear
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.

~~~
torarnv
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.

------
nneonneo
> 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.

------
petetnt
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!

------
jade-cat
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.

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

~~~
jade-cat
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.

------
Bucephalus355
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?

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

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2474
Well apparently they haven't modeled the Death Star yet... Turns out the
closest thing to a Death Star is a bush.

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Cd00d
I think it's really weird that you can't draw people or animals. I tried to
add a t-rex to the world :(

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lostgame
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.

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

Including your web browser!?

~~~
lostgame
_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.

------
b199
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

------
Waterluvian
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.

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

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

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

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40acres
Reading through these comments is actually kind of hilarious, HN is definitely
embracing The Grinch just in time for the holidays.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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bobthechef
I don't get it.

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augbog
Is it just me or is it so slow?

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

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black-tea
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](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)
(which is at least 10 years old at this point).

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

