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Comment by helloworld | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Duo has a simple user experience, which is great. But it doesn't solve the eye-contact problem with video calls today.

When you look at the person on the screen whom you're talking to, that person sees you looking away, because you're not looking into the camera, which is somewhere on the edge of the screen. So you don't make eye contact with the person you're talking to.

And for me, that makes video calls feel weird.

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To be honest, I never found this to be a huge problem.

After hundreds of Skype calls with people, I just don't notice it anymore.

Sure, to fix that problem would be nice. But I don't think the engineering required to put a camera behind a screen, or creepily adjusting people's pupils in realtime, are worth it to rectify what is hardly an issue.

EDIT: also, it's a bit weird to write a critique like yours for the launch of a new platform. No one else solves this issue, so why does Google not solving it suddenly make their platform pointless?

It's like if Tesla releases the Model 3 and you're like "Uh, it doesn't fly? Pass."

" also, it's a bit weird to write a critique like yours for the launch of a new platform"

I think this is a fair critique because the release announcement states the product should address the symptom that "nearly half of us never make video calls on mobile". If you believe the underlying problem is that lack of eye contact makes video calling low-value to many people this is not a viable solution.

Yup. Can't get over the feeling of looking down at the person you are talking to. If you look at the camera, you can't look at the person :(

Just need 4 front facing cameras

No, just place the other person as close to the camera as possible. That'll give the illusion of looking right at the person.

So, google hangouts?

Really, they need a camera a bit above center of the screen.

> Really, they need a camera a bit above center of the screen

Somehow I don't see a phone that has a camera hole in the middle of the screen selling too well. If the camera is put in the bazel, then it replaces looking up/down with looking slightly to the side.

They'd have to solve the "hole in the screen" problem the "camera a bit above center" thing creates. You're not wrong.

Or maybe one on the side of your phone, but forward facing?

Can't they just put a camera behind the screen? Been waiting for this for over a decade

apple has a patent on something similar since 2006, http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...

recently improved upon it: http://appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/08/apple_files_patent...

Wonder why it never made it into a product.

Maybe they tried and current screen tech sucks for it?

Now that people are coming up with ways to put people's real facial expressions in VR, most video calls are probably going to be replaced with avatars generated from your face that use your facial expressions captured by the front-facing camera.

https://vimeo.com/156034648

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has a remarkable little snippet on this. I'll try to find it and respond back.

Edit: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527

Published in 1996

I think a floating head is a lot scarier than people not looking directly at me...

I was imagining something a bit more like http://store.steampowered.com/app/274920.

Or as in Ghost in the Shell. Hard to tell since it's a cartoon, but their video calls always seemed like they were supposed to be looking at a representation of the other person: https://youtu.be/bv3Xyt-0V6s?t=4m30s

The screen would be in the way?

Yes, but there must be some way to make the pixels translucent enough to work

The screen pixels or the camera pixels?

Or put 4 cameras on four sides of the screen and merge the video feed into screen center POV.

You can just virtually move the camera a bit if you are using something like Kinect V2 (with a tiny bit of stereo shadowing as a result).

Most phones have cameras behind their screens, good for taking close-ups of your index finger

1. build an algorithm to detect (using open cv?) and adjust eye position so they look correct to the viewer 2. patent it and license it to apple/google/microsoft 3. ??? 4. profit

    > build an algorithm 
    > adjust eye position

yes, those are the hard parts

[Recent ML work on Gaze Manipulation](http://www.creativeai.net/posts/6fokKr6xuytqsnT9F/deepwarp-p...)

[Online interactive demo](http://sites.skoltech.ru/compvision/projects/deepwarp/)

is it just me or the examples are just creepy ?

anyway I think its a minor issue. I am more worried about if I am dressed / groomed appropriately for the video call rather than if I am having constant eye contact.

that is a major problem too, particularly in Asia and discrimination (race, sex, age, disabled) target groups. audio-only is also impacted (language, stutter, accent, pitch, etc) but to a lesser degree.

but then we developers would be lost without problems.

confirmed creepy. not just you.

To me, the obvious endgame is a 3D reconstruction of the image from the perspective of your eyes, so the screen becomes a "virtual window". I tried to pitch this to Skype a few years back, it felt like a no-brainer given that they were then recently acquired by Microsoft (which is big on similar technologies with Kinect and lately HoloLens). But they were completely uninterested! I think they were so used to Skyping that they didn't feel it was a problem.

Entirely agree with you. This is the missing link in terms of making Video chat a good experience. I find voice is better because I concentrate on what the person is saying. With video I feel like my brain is exhausted trying to compensate for misread visual cues and trying to simulate eye-contact. Also that thing of seeing yourself is horrible...you keep monitoring your own expression which is just weird.

I don't find the non-eye contact thing too big a deal.

But sounds like it might be Skype soon: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/gaze-ma...

I have an iPhone 6S and the front camera seems to do a decent job with the eye-contact problem. I don't seem to need to do the look into the camera when taking selfies.

Great point. Would be nice if we could integrate the lens into the display. :)

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