Google Clips was admittedly one of the most exciting announcements at the Pixel event, earlier this week. The little device is your all-time moments capturing machine that records and clicks your videos and photos. At the event, in the demo video, Google showed us how Clips could be a godsend for new parents as they don't have to bother carrying a camera to record nascent memories of their newborn. Google Clips does all the work automatically and saves it on the cloud.
Google also took care of the privacy to let everyone know that they are being clicked or recorded. The light on the Clips blinks when recording or taking snapshots. Also, it has machine learning integrated inside that gets to know when to record your special moments. Now that we have told you about all the interesting things that it does, we are sure you would now like to know how it pulls it off, right? Well, a chunk of credit goes to a chip that powers the device, which is Intel's Myriad 2 VPU.
Intel's Myriad 2 VPU "Visual Processing Unit" on Google Clips
Intel's Myriad 2 VPU is an ultra-low-power chip that enables Google's algorithms process information in real-time directly on Google Clips. Thanks to this advance VPU, Google Clips does not have to interact with the cloud to identify faces that it should capture. Besides, there is a manual method that lets users mark faces of those who should be clicked or recorded by Clips. This can be done by tapping the manual shutter button on the device. All this work is done offline.
The Myriad 2 is geared with features like facial recognition, pose estimation, 3D depth-sensing, gesture/eye tracking, and more. Additionally, it is also capable of running deep neural networks. Explaining about Google's partnership with Intel, Google’s director of Machine Intelligence Blaise Agüera y Arcas said,“partnership with Movidius has meant that we can port some of the most ambitious algorithms to a production device years before we could have with alternative silicon offerings.”
Myriad 2 helps Google Clips save battery
The Myriad 2 handles all the cloud interaction, which in turn helps Google Clips to not communicate with the cloud constantly, resulting in conservation of battery. Also, the Myriad 2 lets Google Clips' motion photos stay in the internal storage (16GB) of the device until the user allows it to be saved on Google Photos.
This is not the first time when Google has used Myriad on its product, in 2014, the company used Myriad gen-1 to power computer vision capabilities on the first Project Tango phone. Later, in 2016, Myriad was acquired by Intel. Before the acquisition, Google and Movidius signed a deal “to accelerate adoption of machine intelligence applications in mobile devices.”
