Thunderhead Explorer

Let me get the obvious out of the way first. Face detection on a Jetson is not new. NVIDIA ships samples for it, half the tutorials on the internet do it, and I am fairly sure somebody has done it on a Raspberry Pi wearing a HAT. So no, this is not a post about discovering face detection. This is a post about my two Jetsons, an Orin Nano Super and an AGX Orin, that live headless on a shelf with no monitor, no keyboard, and no camera plugged into either of them. I had just finished moving the Nano to JetPack 7.2.1 and pruning both boards down to a lean server install (no desktop, no Docker, nothing starting at boot), and I wanted a small, honest, end-to-end test that they were alive and doing real work. A face detector is a good smoke test. It either draws a box on your nose or it does not. The twist, and the part I actually cared about, is where the camera lives. It is the one in my MacBook Pro. The Jetson never sees a camera device. Frames leave the Mac...

At this year's DevSummit , I did a couple of demo theater presentations. One of them was about hacking the Microsoft Kinect using the Flash platform in a mapping application. Here is a video. Kinect is a very successful and important product for Microsoft. And if you ever played with it using an XBox, you will understand why it is a very neat piece of technology. Now, have you see the movie " Minority Report " ? Remember in the beginning of the movie when Tom Cruise step up to a console and started waving his hands to manipulate images ( video )? One of the gestures that most fascinated me was the one where he twisted his wrist while his fingers were pretending to grab a baseball size object. That twisting gesture moved a sequence of images through time. Twist to the right and the sequence moves forward in time. Twist to the left and the sequence moves back in time. In the movie, he went back and forth to detect a pattern in that time sequence. Now, wouldn't be c...