Sherpa – predictive AI for your iPhone

1_iphone-late@2xSherpa is a new, predictive artificial intelligence that will soon be available for iPhones (if you want to sign up, follow this link).  It’s raised a bit over $1M seed funding so far, and promises big potential by making location a key part of its services.  For example, based on your calendar and current traffic, it would know that you’ll be late for an appointment and offer options for notifying the meeting organizer, and even alternate routes to take.  Ideally you’d be able to avoid that situation, as it would notify you when you need to leave to make it to your meeting on time.  Weather forecasts will be based not only on your current location, but where it knows you’re going.  It’s a background app, pushing information to you as needed…pretty cool stuff if they can pull it off.

Object Removal in Photographs?

So here’s the problem…you want to take a picture of a person in a public space, but all the strangers walking by keep cluttering up the image!  The solution?  Use a soon-to-be-released app from Scalado to just ‘exclude’ those random people from the picture.  I’m not completely certain how the technology works, but believe it’s essentially taking multiple images of the same picture, so once it identifies an area that has changed (a person walking through the image), it has the data already for what should be behind that person.  This video is a nice demonstration of how this technology could be used:

 

It’s easy to see how this can be useful for taking pictures, but think about taking this one step further.  What if this technology were embedded in a realtime AR display?  Imagine wearing AR glasses, and having a wearable computer essentially ‘filter out’ all the people from your field of view.  Or, once you can do that, replacing them with abstracts.  Maybe just floating blue misty shapes like ghosts, so you know there are people there but aren’t distracted by the details?  At that point, the possibilities are endless and really just a matter of creative software implementation.  Awesome.

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