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164 points thunderbong | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.239s | source
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albert_e ◴[] No.41855365[source]
Practically --

I feel hardware technology can improve further to allow under-the-LED-display cameras .... so that we can actually look at both the camera and the screen at the same time.

(There are fingerprint sensors under mobile screens now ...and I think even some front facing cameras are being built in without sacrificing a punch hole / pixels. There is scope to make this better and seamless so we can have multiple cameras if we want behind a typical laptop screen or desktop monitor.)

This would make for a genuine look-at-the-camera video whether we are looking at other attendees in a meeting or reading off our slide notes (teleprompter style).

There would be no need to fake it.

More philosophically --

I don't quite like the normalization of AI tampering with actual videos and photos casually -- on mobile phone cameras or elsewhere. Cameras are supposed to capture reality by default. I know there is already heavy noise reduction, color correction, auto exposure etc ... but no need to use that to justify more tampering with individual facial features and expressions.

Videos are and will be used for recording humans as they are. The capturing of their genuine features and expressions should be valued more. Video should help people bond as people with as genuine body lanuage as possible. Videos will be used as memories of people bygone. Videos will be used as forensic or crime scene evidence.

Let us protect the current state of video capture. All AI enhancements should be marketed separately under a different name, not silently added into existing cameras.

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YeahThisIsMe ◴[] No.41857383[source]
I agree with this.

I don't actually want the person I'm talking to to appear to be looking directly into my eyes because it's weird - it means they're looking at the camera and not at me on the screen, talking to them.

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1. mannykannot ◴[] No.41858471[source]
Indeed - intense eye contact can be unsettling, even without the additional information gleaned from knowing that the other party has chosen to look at the camera.

Eye contact is a subtle and important dynamic in human interaction (to the point where it has been suggested that we have white sclera, while our closest ape cousins do not, as an adaptation in support of easily detecting eye contact.) In a meeting, that includes third parties seeing who is making eye contact with whom.

The systems being discussed here are too simple to restore this natural dynamic, and it is not clear to me that always-on eye contact correction[1] is free of unintended and undesirable consequences - for example, in some circumstances, it might ramp up the tension in a discussion, or it might help someone who is dissembling.

[1] Even with random look-aways, I suspect - in actual conversation, look-aways are often correlated with what's going on in the discussion.