Utkarsh Sinha
Microsoft Pix
Note: Most images on this page have been picked from the official landing page.
Microsoft Pix is Microsoft’s super camera app that rivals those of the iPhone and Pixel devices. Developing this iPhone app was a very enriching experience for me where I learned aspects about product development, merging cutting-edge technology with user experience and balancing code quality with pace of execution.
Picking the best shot
A few components working in tandem made this possible: combining a stream of photos, focussing on people for sharp images and adjusting settings when a face is detected.
Photosynth
Microsoft’s Photosynth was a really cool demo back in 2008-2009 during my undergrad. It now lives in the app’s Panorama mode and works in near realtime!
Live images
Subtle motion in images. This was my hack at Angelhack in 2013 and here I am working on a product that already does this. Such wow much fun!
Pix-Comix
We hacked something at Microsoft’s One Week Hackathon and created a feature worthy of shipping. This was probably the most fun thing I’ve ever worked on.
Whiteboard and business card recognition
Pix can detect, capture and clean-up images of whiteboards and business cards. The app also features directly connecting with users on LinkedIn based on their business cards. Very slick!
Hyperlapse
Speeding up videos without giving you vertigo was the plan behind this project. Stabilizing videos on device and then encoding it to a video was a feat accomplished by this project.
Style transfer
Style transfer is a very popular machine learning technique that makes an image look like a work of art instantly. As an addon, Pix Painting lets you create artistic “painting in progress” videos.
Learnings
- Product development is hard.
- Writing cross-platform + performant code is hard.
- C++ is a lot more fun that it used to be a decade or so ago.
- Machine learning + computation photography can produce awesome results.