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Waymo CEO Explains Why Camera-Only Self-Driving Falls Short

✇Slashdot
Par : BeauHD
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can't take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that "weak sensing" hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. [...] Dolgov made the comments in a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School, walking through the lessons Waymo has learned building its driver over close to two decades. He put the sensor question on the table plainly: "there's been a long-standing debate about what kind of sensors do you actually need for autonomous driving." His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. "Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence," he said. "If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that's a very reasonable way to go." Then the catch. If you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, "you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early." Dolgov said that cameras, lidar, and radar are complementary rather than redundant: "These different sensing modalities, they're not backups to each other," and combining them produces a view "vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor." He said multiple sensor types also protect against physical failures, such as a leaf or branch blocking a camera, while helping Waymo climb the "exponential ladder of nines" required for fully driverless safety. Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." He also pushed back on the cost argument against lidar, calling it "a number that has a fairly short shelf life" as hardware costs continue to fall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Viltrox’s ‘silver trio’ gives Fujifilm shooters lenses that actually match their cameras

✇News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Par : Mitchell Clark

Viltrox is making it easier to get lenses that match your camera’s aesthetic.

Image of the Viltrox AF 25mm F1.7 Air in silver on a silver Fujifilm X-T100.Viltrox

Viltrox is making it easier for owners of Fujifilm cameras with silver bodies to accessories. The company has announced “the silver trio” of lenses: the AF 9mm F2.8 Air, AF 15mm F1.7 Air and AF 25mm F1.7 Air for X mount, which you can now get with a coat of silver, rather than black, paint.

Apart from the different coloring, the lenses are the same as the black versions that the company released throughout last year. However, those undeniably looked like many other Viltrox lenses, which themselves have similar styling to the lenses released by other third-party manufacturers. The silver versions might stand out just that bit more, and should better match the myriad cameras that Fujifilm makes in a similar finish. It’s easy to imagine these being mounted to an X-M5, or an X-T30 III.

Despite the “silver trio” name, these lenses join another two X-mount lenses that Viltrox was also producing in silver: the AF 35mm F1.7 Air and the AF 56mm F1.7 Air. 

Of course, there will be those who prefer the black versions, and some people will scoff at the idea that anyone cares about what color their lens or camera body is, and whether those things match. There will also be those that wish the emulation of Fujifilm’s style wasn’t just skin deep, and that the lenses would include things like aperture rings, which both drastically change the aesthetic, as well as the experience of using them.

But whether it makes sense to the function over form crowd, many photographers clearly care about the color and decoration of their gear, as evidenced by the fact that Fujifilm itself sometimes sees fit to create silver versions of its lenses to sit alongside the black ones, and the frequency with which companies like Leica produce equipment in new colors. It’s nice to see a company providing these options on some of its budget-oriented gear as well; the prices vary depending on which lens you’re looking at, but they all come in under the $250 mark.

The silver versions of the lenses are available now from Viltrox’s website, at the same prices of their black counterparts. Humorously, the versions of the lenses for Sony E and Nikon Z mount are still only available in black for the time being (though neither company is as prolific as Fujifilm when it comes to releasing silver cameras).

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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