Phil Smeeton's Tech Thinking Blog

  If someone were to to put me on the spot and say describe to me the most significant methods the tech business has available for the advancement of its objectives since the millennium I would reply with the advancement of computer programming languages. By advancement I mean the capability of the language to describe and model our universe in software, with the right type and amount of compute to be useful and provide usable and rich insight to the human users. Our ability to describe the universe using richer and richer computer languagues is a direct contributing factor in the success of what we are doing in the tech industry. Smarter software, richer bigger data lakes, more meaningful reporting revealing new potentially valuable insight in everything we are interested in.

Liquid, real time photoshop-like corrections of skin tone and the removal of dark circles. With the increasing ubiquity of video calling, I thought that we ought to think about something that is a factor in the developed world, the enhancement of human beauty and care for appearance (particularly) during social interactions. If we take a look at how the computer has helped this process already we can see graphics applications like Adobe Photoshop operated by skilled human users touching up and removing imperfections.  I think the case for digital human beautification is a strong one, after all unless you have scheduled your video calls carefully chances are excellent that you will be caught out at a time when you are not looking your very best. This is where hardware and very good software is the answer using a up-streaming type metaphor the moving images are enhanced prior to leaving the users computer. Maybe we can describe this new specialist hardware chip as virtual makeup, it ...