United has several planes with what appear to be active IR LEDs in the same spot on the front bezel. Any idea what those are doing? Tracking empty seats? Movement for some reason?
It's for detecting when your hands move towards the display, and turning on LEDs in response (for instance, many in-seat monitors have a USB socket with a LED ring around it) - I worked on those units many years ago.
Pretty cool, I guess I never picked up on the behavior because I am mostly on my laptop.
Delta does too. It appears it grows more intense the closer you get your hands to it, and the lights near the bottom of the screen turn on when your hand is sufficiently close to the sensor/LED thing.
Maybe it's a nice ease of access feature to turn the screen back on after it's turned off in the dark on the flight