We Enter The Final Countdown: A Huge New Addition with 36 Hours To Go
almost 4 years ago – Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 11:37:13 PM

Earlier today we passed a big goal- 5,000 backers and $1,000,000 in pledges raised. But our biggest goal is still out there: $1.5 Million for a new, awesome, competition using the OAK platform. In order to hit that, we knew we would have to dig deep. So we did. 

For the final 36 hours of this campaign, backers at any reward tier will be able to add Deep Learning with PyTorch (an official OpenCV.org course) at a $180 savings off the regular price. Scroll down the pledge list and you'll see the tier you're on duplicated with the course added. If you backed at the OAK-1 Campaign Edition pledge level, you'd look for OAK-1 + Deep Learning Course tier. These course spots are currently invitation-only, and reserved for backers, but this special offer ends when the campaign ends August 13th at 6:01am PDT.

The course includes 100 Free GPU hours of Azure credits to be used with Microsoft Azure Cloud Services and will cover an Intro, Image Segmentation, Image Classification, Object Detection, and Deploying your deep learning mdoel. To find out more about this course visit the OpenCV Courses page.

OAK is a tremendous platform for learning, and we hope those of you who are new to deep learning or even just want to brush up find this useful. Join us!

4 Days to go! Go In-Depth with the Social Distancing Feedback for Visually Impaired People Project. Plus: A Video Demo of Pose Estimation
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Aug 08, 2020 at 08:38:14 PM

It’s a rare and elusive Saturday update! Because some news is too cool to wait on.

4 Days Left In the Campaign

The campaign is still going strong, even on a traditionally slow weekend day like today. As I'm writing this we're at $873,149 from 4,491 of you incredible human beings. It's going to take a bit more for us to hit our $1,000,000 and eventually the $1,500,000 goal, but if we keep pushing we can do it!

 In-Depth Post About Social Distancing Feedback for Visually Impaired People Project

Huge shoutout to community member Ibai Gorordo for this excellent in-depth Medium post about his project for the OpenCV Spatial AI Competition sponsored by Intel, “Social distancing feedback for visually impaired people using a wearable camera.”

Ibai’s post covers the goals of the project as well as getting started with OAK on Windows, and even compares OAK-D’s depth output to Azure Kinect. OAK-D does well in this comparison:

Ibai: “As it can be observed, even though the OAK-D uses a stereo camera the results are very good. Particularly, in the case of the table, the OAK-D was able to estimate the depth correctly whereas the TOF sensor in the Azure Kinect failed.”

You’ll be able to follow the project through the GitHub repository. We appreciate your work, Ibai! Best of luck in the competition. You can find a list of all the Phase 1 winners on the OpenCV blog.

Video Demonstration: Pose Estimation

On-demand pose estimation is one of the many complex “wow-inducing” features that OAK puts in reach for every developer. Just by pointing your OAK module at a person you can can now estimate an articulated version of their joints.

This pose estimation technology is incredibly useful for animators, video effects artists, and fitness tracking projects just to name a few. It’s not just theoretical, either- The competition project we featured on 7/31, “At Home Work-out Assistance Device” will make use of this too.

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Have a great Saturday, everyone! Keep sharing and we'll reach $1.5m together.

Community Friday #3: Spotlight on OAK in an Autonomous Lawnmower, An Awesome Underwater Drone, and Just $150k to go to $1 mllion!
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Aug 08, 2020 at 07:33:09 PM

Greetings, backers and soon-to-be-backers and welcome to another Community Friday. In case you missed it, yesterday we talked about passing $800k and explained how to make sure you can get PoE versions of OAK-1 and OAK-D..

 Just $150k To Go Until We Hit $1 Million! 

When we started this campaign we had a simple goal- to show the world the new, exciting, possibilities for Spatial AI technology made possible by the OpenCV AI Kit. With your help, we’ve done that and then some: 4400 backers and $850,000 later the world has heard loud and clear.

But now isn’t the time to slow down! With just 5 days left to meet the next stretch goals in the campaign, it’s time to buckle up and go into turbo mode. Please keep the tweets posts coming and don’t forget to use the sharing resources we created when you post. Only together we can reach $1,000,000 and beyond.

Spatial AI Competition Spotlight: OAKMower

Lawn-moving is a common time-consuming and inefficient household task. In recent years, automated mowers have become popular among people who can’t mow themselves or have very large areas to maintain. OpenCV Spatial AI Competition Phase 1 winners Jan Lukas Augustin and Silas Raschka intend to use OAK-D to control an autonomous mower, showcasing OAK’s depth data, semantic segmentation, and object detection capabilities while keeping humans and other animals safe from the spinning blades.

Best of luck in the Phase 2 of the competition, Jan and Silas!

 Community Spotlight: PINT00309 aka Katsuya Hyodo 

Katsuya Hyodo is an open source developer and OAK community member from Japan. His GitHub profile contains a ton of useful and interesting Deep Learning resources and code, including a huge variety of models in his model zoo, which have been converted to work with OpenVINO and can readily be made to work with OAK.  In fact, look for models from this zoo to be supported directly on OAK near you soon, including pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and combinations of the two. The OAK team is greatly indebted to his awesome work, and the project would have been much more difficult without it. Even the first prototype or our life safety idea, which is what inspired OAK, was built using a PINTO0309 Github repository which combined the NCS2, Intel D435, and a Raspberry Pi to provide Spatial AI. Thank you!

 OAK Goes Underwater With The NanoJet

As we’ve talked about in the past, embedded spatial AI tech has great potential for capital-G Good. That potential isn’t just limited to the land and air, through. Community member Colin Crichton designed an awesome submersible drone called “NanoJet." That would be cool enough on it’s own, but get this- that’s an OAK-D as part of the sensor array on the front. You can check it out in 3D using this nifty WebGL viewer.

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This Community Friday marks our 25th update! You can look back on all 25 posts in the archive on Kickstarter. Thank you so much for your support over the course of this campaign so far. We've got just a little way to go before it's time to shift gears into production mode, but until then we'll keep pushing toward the next goals! Have a great weekend folks.

$750k Stretch Goal Reached! Mystery Goal #2 Revealed! Plus: The Three Week Campaign Stats Infographic, Just 7 Days Left!
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Aug 07, 2020 at 09:59:37 PM

Welcome to Wednesday! Welcome to the world in which thanks to your pledges and support we’ve unlocked the Power-over-Ethernet version of OAK-D! In case you missed it, yesterday we did a Reddit AMA, revealed the t-shirt design, and talked about the HQ Pi camera! Today is the three-week anniversary of the campaign launch, and passing that goal is the icing on the cake. Onward to $1 million!

OAK-D Gets A New PoE Version

Our title let the cat out of the bag but last night this campaign passed $750,000 pledged! That means we’ve unlocked the PoE version of OAK-D, which our team has already started prototyping. It also means we've revealed the last Stretch Goal, Mystery Goal #2. More on that later in the update.

We’re still working out the details of how to best make sure backers are able to get these new modules first. We’ll have more details very soon.

Next Stretch Goal: Aluminum Cases!

The next stretch goal, with $240,000 to go, is aluminum cases for OAK-1 and OAK-D. This will greatly improve their robustness in the field, make your modules easier to transport, plus they will look very snazzy.

We've got a great shot at hitting this goal but only with some help from all of you out there. Don't forget that you can use the handy OAK Sharing Resources page to find pics, GIFs, and links to our favorite press articles for sharing on social media.

Our $1.5 million Goal: Community Spatial AI Competition II 

The OAK team believes in betting big- and betting on you. The nearly overwhelming response (235 entrants!) to the OpenCV Spatial AI Competition Sponsored by Intel reinforced what we already knew: That there’s a growing global community of people working on incredible things using Spatial AI, and we are uniquely positioned to help bring those ideas to life.

That’s why when we were deciding the campaign’s largest Stretch Goal, the top of the mountain, it was obvious: When this campaign reaches $1.5 million dollars we are dedicating ourselves to hosting another competition for the community: Spatial AI Competition II.

When we started the campaign, practically nobody knew of OAK. Now, with all of you here, and that kind of money behind it… well, you can imagine what kind of awesome competition we could throw. Let’s get there together.

The Three Week Campaign Summary Infographic

What a long, strange, trip it’s been. Today’s three-week campaign anniversary saw us passing 4000 total backers and $750,000 total pledged. We’re on fire, let’s keep it up!

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Thank you so much, backers and subscribers! This is the last week of the campaign, and we know the anticipation is very real. Keep sharing, keep pledging, and keep commenting. Stick with us! We're almost there.

Tomorrow: OAK Chief Engineer Brandon Gilles on Augmented Startups
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 11:50:13 PM

Quick note: At 5:45 AM PDT, about 10 hours from now, Brandon will be appearing on Augmented Startups! He'll be talking OAK and more this a video interview- you can bookmark or set a reminder for the episode premiere on the YouTube page.