Eye Contact Correction: Redirecting the eyes to look at the camera

The thing with eye contact, though, is that it is worthless if you are never able to look away. When it's artificial like this, it's worse than not being there at all. It's just creepy. It was the same with nvidia's implementation a couple of years ago. It was just weird.

I do appreciate that this is a problem worth solving though, and I spent a lot of my time during COVID worrying about the negative impact that normalising loss of eye contact would have on the social interactions of our younger generations.

Back in 2021, I took one of those £50 teleprompter mirrors that YouTubers use, put a 7in raspberry pi display in the slot where you're meant to put your phone, and made it my 'work calls display' for a couple of days. The interesting thing is that the only people that noticed without me pointing it out were completely non-technical, and when they did they complemented me on the quality of my webcam rather than the fact I was looking straight at them; they could tell something was better, but couldn't quite put their finger on it. Which is funny because I'm sure being stuck behind a cheap perspex one way mirror made my actual camera quality a bit worse.

I remember I got to the point where I started playing with cv2 trying to do realtime facial landmark detection on the incoming feed and having a helper process shift the incoming video window around the little screen so that it would keep the bridge of the other person's nose (the point I naturally made eye contact with) pinned to the bit of the screen that was directly in front of the webcam lens. Then one morning I walked into my office, saw this monstrosity on my desk, realised I was nerd sniping myself and gave up.

One thing I do remember though is how odd it felt looking at yourself in a mirror without your image being mirrored. Not sure my brain was ready for that one after thousands of years of looking at itself in mirrored surfaces.

Bit of a weird pic but the only one I can find: https://pasteboard.co/BXE6zhbpOD7E.jpg

I wanted to do this but got stuck in the rabbit hole of picking out telepromters, screens and sizes. In the end my solution was to mount my webcam in the middle of the monitor (with the other party partially obscured). Previously my technique was to look at the camera not the screen (or have the other party in a very small window at the top of my screen) so partially obscured is an improvement!

> One thing I do remember though is how odd it felt looking at yourself in a mirror without your image being mirrored. Not sure my brain was ready for that one after thousands of years of looking at itself in mirrored surfaces.

Feynman has a good explanation for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msN87y-iEx0

But it doesn't go deeper as to why we're perceiving ourselves that way, for that we have to dive into biology, neurology, bilateral symmetry, and the fundamentals as to how, as bilaterally symmetric beings, we're able to orient ourselves in a 3D world.

(I recall reading a paper or watching some video about that, but can't find it anymore)