Wednesday, December 25, 2013

My kickstarter explained using only the 1000 most used words

A wordle using all words from the VMX Project Kickstarter original text

Describing new technology without sounding intimidating is a daunting task, especially when you have a kickstarter about emerging technology which intersects the fields of artificial intelligence and computer vision!  Above you can see a Wordle (a visual collection of most frequently used words, size proportional to frequency) I made from the original text of my Kickstarter named VMX Project: Computer Vision for Everyone. Below, I summarize the Kickstarter using only the 1000 most used words. Below, I wrote a summary using this reduced subset of English words. To quickly explain: the Up-Goer Fixe Text Editor (inspired by this XKCD) lets you type some text and makes sure you don't use uncommon words. Here are just a few of the words are banned from the summary: vision, code, product, item, detect, robot, automate, program, machine, automatic, object, and teach. I took a half hour, decided to use the word "VMX" because it is the product name, and this is the summary I came up with.




VMX is all about "computer seeing." To make a computer recognize things like cars, people, faces, hands, dogs, couches, or bottles is not easy. If these things could be recognized in real-time either from a picture or live, we could make new ways of playing games with computers, play different music/shows when different friends' faces are recognized, or control your computer with your hands.

This type of "computer seeing" problem is very hard to try to answer yourself. I have been studying "computer seeing" for 10 years, and made VMX, which is a new way of getting stuff recognized in pictures by computers. You use VMX when you want something recognized in a picture. It is very fast -- you can add new stuff to be recognized in a few minutes. With VMX, you won't have to know how "computer seeing" is used by a computer to recognize things in pictures, and won't have to read hard books or papers. VMX is made for everyone to enjoy "computer seeing" -- It is easy, saves you lots of time, and can be quite fun. You can make VMX recognize and act on the things in your home, your friends' faces, or even body parts like hands. Because VMX is so easy to use, you spend more using "computer seeing" in fun ways and we let you easily share your cool ideas with other people, if and when you want to.

If you give us 100$, we'll let you use VMX early, and you'll get more use time (2x to 3x) than people paying later in the year. For 25$, you'll still get more use time (2x to 3x). The more you help, the better deal on use time you get, and get to play with VMX earlier!

Thanks for for helping us make VMX come to life! Merry Christmas!

[This post was inspired by the Christmas entry from Scott Aaronson's blog, Shtetl-Optimized, called "Merry Christmas! My quantum computing research explained, using only the 1000 most common English words", and it's a great exercise for unlearning the curse of Knowledge!]


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