How iOS 13 redraws your eyes so you're looking at the camera

I think there's hard to draw boundaries. Small burnishes I think everyone would be okay with a touch-up. But on the other hand large changes people will feel deceived if they meet that person irl. The difficult is in the middle, which is going to have some distribution of perception of deception.

I think this is different than touching up models because we never end up seeing their true form. Though I remember when the fappening happened a lot of people mentioned how they felt better about themselves after seeing these people's true selves.

The existence of the feature is not a problem, that’s just where technology is heading. For individual use it could be enabled, if desired

But it being made default and thereby de facto saying that everyone needs it is absurd. There is no way that something like this is not damaging to society in the long run

But it doesn't capture the image the user expects it to capture - when on a Facetime call, they expect (or at least want, if they think about it at all) to be looking directly at the other parties to the call. All this is doing is correcting for that, hence "emotional truth". Reality is always shaped by our emotions and our mental state, and thus there is merit to the idea that a representation of reality that isn't 100% physically accurate can still be closer to what we perceive as reality.

Maybe instead of emotional truth, how about the actual truth is that most people are actually looking the other person dead in the eye, as is appropriate for engaging with people. This camera magic just makes that more clear.

The offset camera position also "changes the content" just as surely as this new process which compensates for it.

The camera doesn’t capture a “scene.” It’s all just electrical impulses on a CCD. You the perform extensive processing to turn those impulses into something approximating that someone might see. It doesn’t seem a big stretch to, while you’re at it, interpret the signals in a way that reflects where the person would actually be looking.

“Emotional truth” is the wrong phrase. It’s the actual truth—the person on the other side is looking at your eyes.

The real issue is that the processing isn’t sophisticated enough. Instead of just moving the eyes, it should calculate what the camera would show if it were located in the screen.

On a technical level every photographic print or even SOOC jpeg has some level of image processing applied to it during development, whether analog or digital.

On an artistic level: https://toinformistoinfluence.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/19...

I see no philosophical difference between adjusting in-camera settings (aperture, focus, white balance) and this. In both cases, you're modifying the "feel" of the image (in fact, with preprocessing, you're generally affecting the image in a wholesale manner).

Digital cameras don't "capture reality", either. They scan the image over a small period of time, same as your average display in reverse. It's essentially a really fast time lapse, on the pixel level. Arguably, that's as much "not reality" as what Apple is doing here.

I mean, I guess I understand the idea of "capturing reality as close as possible". I just don't see much merit in caring too much outside of an academic context. This isn't deepfakery. This is shifting eyes to provide the much needed feedback of eye contact while on a video call.

It doesn’t capture reality. Our own eyes don’t even do that. We don’t even know what “reality” is because we only experience it through our the filters of our mind.

CCDs are just stupid light buckets and the reality of them is, at best, a spreadsheet showing those counts. Everything beyond that is a choice someone made to present things a certain way.

And everything before the photograph is taken is that way too. Framing, exposure time, time of day, choice of subject... etc. all influence the “reality” captured in the photograph.

Half the reason you probably think they capture reality in the sense you mean is because photographers not shooting for Instagram generally try very hard to make it appear that way. But... they don’t.

> Eyes correction is as much reality as deepfakes.

I think you're making 2 mistakes:

- first, thinking that the line is between what we think of as normal camera usage, and eye correction & deep fakes. But the image that we see now is already a result of image correction—white balance, exposure, lens adjustments, and and more secret processing that we don't even get told about.

- second, that it's a hard line. The possibilities aren't "no adjustment whatsoever" and "deepfakes". It's a gradient; there are minor adjustments (like white balance), moderate adjustments (like eye correction), and even greater adjustments (like deep fakes). It's not a hard line line at all. Eye correction is much closer to reality than deep fakes, and a lack of eye correction is closer to reality still.

"But it captures the light coming in. So far we called any post-processing which changes that reality either a filter/effect or a bug."

No, even analog photography, choices in developing certainly effect how the "light coming in" turns into a picture. As well as the particular camera used, and it's settings (aperture, ISO, shutter speed), and the film chosen.

The choices the digital photography system makes are no less choices with effects on the "captured light" than the ones made after you get bits out of the camera. They're just choices made by the engineers who designed the digital camera. There is no single 'true' way to "capture light".

> When a photographer chooses a particular brand or type of film, he’s already deciding what kind of reality he wants to show. Different types of film show reality and colors differently. Photographers pick film based on what they want the result to look like. Film photography never ever showed reality, not even close.

https://www.theworldaheadofus.com/blog/photography-does-not-...

> But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience… Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.

http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyEx...

But I don't actually disagree that there is something new going on lately with new kinds of digital processing. I don't think it's "all the same" exactly, we definitely have new techniques of altering and manipulating photos that give us SO MUCH more power than we had before, that I think it's reasonable to say it's a new thing.

But the original photographs never "captured reality" without intervention or manipulation. A photo is necessarily an intervention and a manipulation, in a variety of different ways. A photo never truly "captured reality" in an objective sense, it always depended on the photographer's choices, and the details of the technology used, in ways that mattered for what was perceived in the photo. But yeah, we have whole new orders of magnitude of it available, I'd agree.

1. Engineering constraint: the camera is not as sensitive to light as humans

2. Workaround: it emits a flash which creates an undesirable side effect

3. Fix: we clean up in software

Is like?

1. Engineering constraint: The camera can't be positioned behind the LCD panel the user is actually looking at

2. Workaround: it's placed 1 inch above which creates an undesirable side effect

3. Fix: we clean it up in software

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In both cases we get closer to where we'd be if the engineering constraint did not exist.

Not to mention having a hole in your screen when you just want to watch a video. It's a ridiculous idea, but funny to think about.

More seriously, I'm wondering if at some point the front-facing camera may be an intrinsic part of the screen. I've read that on-screen fingerprint sensors already use a kind of camera in the screen. If that were to become good enough to see images at a distance, that might actually work.

Cameras are already being placed under the screen e.g. Xiaomi have implemented it and it probably won't be long before it's public.

I personally think it's too far, we should stick to bezels so we can have great hardware for cameras, speakers and screens.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/5/18654365/xi...

When I last had to replace my phone, because it fell out of my pocket exiting my car, I received a new phone, not with a dead pixel, but an entire column of dead pixels. No visible damage, straight up just powered it on after openning the box. Immediately called my phone company to request a replacement and they wanted me to buy a new phone. Said fuck that, I paid full retail for the new phone amd its defective out of the box. Send me a new phone and a prepaid shipping bill for the return.

I think you missed his point (whether it's strong or not). He's saying there's an irony in the idea of focusing on proper appearance to the person on the phone when the boundaries of what's appropriate for loud speakerphone calls in a public environment have been lowered too far. Like worrying about whether you look nice while walking off a cliff. I think that's the point, whether one agrees with him or not.

That's not how the slippery slope fallacy works.

You can elaborate on what you think will happen and why, if this gains traction. Anything else is just... literally FUD.

Just waits for when you look at camera and grabs that texture.