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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited for transparent OLED's simply so that laptops and monitors will be able to put the webcam behind the display, ~1/3 from the top.

Then videoconferencing software can automatically move the image of the person you're talking to so their eyes are roughly centered on that point.

And finally everyone gets to make direct eye contact again!

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The thought of a webcam constantly pointing at users has already creeped them out enough to make camera covers a popular item. Imagine how well that segment of the population would react to a hidden camera...

I think one solution would be like a purism laptop (and upcoming phone) - hardware switches (they one for camera/mic, one for bt/wifi)

Yes I can see the discussion at hardware manufacturers now.

Marketing: 'So, we can monitor users and collect sellable data through a camera hidden behind their monitor?'

Engineer: 'Why yes, but maybe we should allow users to disable this through some kind of hardware switch. It could lead to potential privacy violations etc.'

Marketing: 'If they turned it off could we still collect marketable data?'

Engineer: 'Well no...that's sort of the point...'

Marketing: 'I see...so invisible hidden cameras that can't be disabled you say?'

Ethical engineer: Not if you want anyone to keep working here. Also, it'll make the news. No.

Many, many engineers driven more by money than they want to admit: “well if I don’t do it someone else will.”

Marketing: Make the news eh? Well any publicity's good publicity and we can outsource these kinds of things can't we? Maybe we could save a bit of money that way. Excellent idea. Get right on it.

Yeah 'ethical engineers'.

They exists don't get me wrong but you know plenty of engineers don't care or bother with more simple things like recycling, keeping themselfs in shape, working on their own mental health etc. etc.

There are plenty fish in the ocean which do not care or just never thought about the implications.

After a decade of hardware buttons that aren't, e.g. TV power buttons, I think for most people trust has sailed. It works if the company builds it's brand on it (Purism) but I would not trust a hardware switch from Lenovo or Dell.

Is dell as untrustworthy as lenovo?

I do remember the lenovo driver that installed itself from the bios - even on a clean windows install - and would snoop for months and then silently uninstall itself.

EDIT: here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Lenovo_Service_Engine

However I have not heard much about dell.

I've owned a Dell XPS13 which was the crappiest product I've bought in a while. So I'd say the problem with Dell is more inablity vs. malicious intent.

What was so bad about it?

We've bought/had replaced half a dozen XPS13s in the last 18 months and all but one have had to be returned, some are on their second replacement. QA seems to be non-existent

What was so bad about them?

Not the person you were replying to, but anecdotally my XPS 15 9550 has been nothing but a nightmare.

It's on battery #3 from the battery swelling issue, a lot of backlight bleed on the 4K Display, coil whine in the power supply (went through three of those), three DC jacks (might need to be a 4th soon), the infamous VRM/throttling issue, and to top it all off I had the main board replaced within the first two years because of a firmware problem preventing Windows from activating. Less of problem with the system itself, but during that mobo job Dell replaced the 512GB Samsung SSD with a Toshiba 1TB and R/W speeds dropped to ~1/3 of what they were before. Also anecdotal but a buddy of mine with a 9560 has gone through more or less the same issues, sans the firmware problem.

They look so appealing on paper (which is why I chose it over a MBP), but there's just something about them that feels proof-of-concept, like it's an unfinished product that was pushed out too quick. I wanted to give Dell another chance, having gone private three years before and having seemingly improved their build quality. When you spend $3800 on what is supposed to be the best-of-the-best and it turns out to be the headache of a lifetime, it leaves a really sour aftertaste.

Wow, so it's not just the Precision models that are lottery. In my area of the company we mostly use DELL precision and I kid you not, every second one (Precision 7550) has some sort of a problem. They vary from the ones that give you blue screen of death, throttling issue in CAD/CAE software ect.

I ordered a XPS 15 (9570) last year to replace my wife's slow Walmart special. We debated between Mac and Wintel and decided to stick with Wintel due to familiarity and various programs we run. We get the delivery, take it out of the box, plug it in, turn it on... and this horrible screeching noise greets us like someone is cutting a piece of metal with an angle grinder. It was not a shipping bug either, the package arrived in perfect shape.

That pretty much summed up the difference between Apple and everyone else for me.

As a counterpoint to that (and maybe it has just been a particular model series), I've had the 9343 XPS13 for 5 years now without issue. The battery life is much shorter now, for sure, but it's been a daily driver for all that time so I'm not so surprised.

I don't recall the model number anymore, but I also had an XPS13 for around three years at my last job. Had it running linux as my primary machine for web (and some mobile) development, and the only issue I ever had was that the onboard microphone sounded pretty bad.

I've seen a lot of bad reports, so maybe I just got lucky, but I hope not since I loved that machine and the XPS line would be pretty high up on my list if I was in the market for a new laptop now.

I'll just add on to this. Also have had an XPS13 as a daily driver for about a year and have nothing major to complain about. A slight coil buzz while charging, nostril cam and shitty microphone are some minor gripes, but all in all it's been great.

I had one and it was a lemon. It was so bad that I gave it away and got a second-hand laptop to work for almost a year, it made me so much more productive.

(XPS13 was max specced) Battery died, Fan died, booted during the night on it's own, due to the failed fan made a loud alarm noise, louder than our fire alarm (wondered what the developer thought there), paid for premium business support with next day replacement, Dell didn't want to repair the thing but wanted me to jump through dozens of update loops, mouse pad went bad.

Alot of vendors (Lenovo[0], ASUS, Dell, ) are using Windows Platform Binary Table, WPBT (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18095848) to get the OS to execute binary. Dell seem to use it to load the Absolute's Lojack anti theft rootkit[1]. Also on Absolute's website there's a list[2] of manufacturers that are using Absolute Persistance[3].

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenov...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807

[2]: https://www.absolute.com/partners/device-compatibility/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Home_%26_Office#Absol...

Wow. Almost every Linux distribution would never enable such a thing. As for Apple's Macs, it's all a black box in and of itself.

Dell has an anti theft ‘solution’ that works the same as this, as do all the major vendors. The fault is with Microsoft for allowing that crap in the first place.

The camera would be useless until the pixels in front of it are turned off, right? If you see a small "hole-punch" in your screen, the camera is on.

OLEDs can be turned on and off in fractions of a second. The camera sensor could take a picture while the led is off and there’d be no way to tell.

I’m curious why software can’t correct this now? Messenger can make me look like a sheep, can’t it move my gaze?

Available in FaceTime:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/22/facetime-eye-cont...

It can, I've tried gaze correction software, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making the speaker look possessed. Total uncanny valley.

We humans are sensitive to every tiny detail of the eye, because we express so much emotion through it. It's no joke that the "eye is the window to the soul". Gaze correction software literally winds up looking like it messes with your soul.

Maybe someday we'll invent gaze correction that actually looks realistic -- but because it involves not just moving the eyeball, but opening/closing the eyelid (the eyelid moves as our eyes move vertically, like for a webcam), therefore moving the eyelashes, involving compensation with the lower eyelid, and more... it's going to be really hard.

I recall once having a conversation with someone working on computer vision at Facebook, and they mentioned that the company had spent a considerable amount of talent & resources trying to get this feature to work cleanly and they did not get past the uncanny valley problems.

Gaze redirection looks bad partly because head orientation ends up decoupling from eye direction.

With a depth camera you can move the camera's entire vantage point as if it were behind the right area on screen. Hat's probably a better approach, along with AI filling in the disocclusions (more cameras can also do this).

What we have today is called "teleprompter", and not even particularly recent. With some slight pre-distortion and a tilted monitor it should also handle the focus issue a classic teleprompter setup has. Basically, you just place a half-reflective mirror at a 45 degree angle, lay the screen flat facing up (I propose a slight back-tilt "so the camera can see better", but you loose contrast due to viewing angle, which would ideally be corrected by the LCD), and look at the camera that's behind the mirror, while being able to view the screen in the mirror.

If you don't want to wait for eye-contact and have two monitors, you can place the webcam between the monitors and center your conversation-partner's image/window on the camera. Works great.

That's a great idea, thanks!

45 degree half silvered mirror can also do it (https://www.fastcompany.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-wea... )

I think that’s a poor approach. While you end up with gaze more in the center of the display, you don’t always have a face directly centered. This alleviates some of the problem, but doesn’t remove it. A better approach that I’ve always wanted is to have four cameras on the corners of the display that generate a real time photogrametric projection of your face. This would mean not only would your camera view be dead center, it’d be center no matter where you were looking on the screen. Much better especially in situations where there are multiple people in a meeting. You could even have different streams for each meaning to the other attendees it appeared as if you were looking directly at them only when you actually were.

Or you can just look at the camera instead of the screen

This is surprisingly difficult with a device like an iPad or smartphone in landscape where the camera is off to one side. Even knowing where the camera is, the image of the person on your screen that you're talking to tends to pull your gaze back. You can do it; it's just an effort.

And if both parties are doing it you might as well just cut the video.

It would be relatively trivial to automatically keep the face of the person you're talking to centered around the webcam using face detection. As a person moves in frame, your computer will "pan" to keep them centered.

Four cameras is intriguing, but also expensive and complicated, and will probably have a very rough time with things like eyelashes, edges of hair, different patterns of reflections on the eyeballs, different glare from lighting, etc. Realistic photogrammetry is really hard in practice, and runs the risk of being really uncanny valley.

Photogrammetry doesn't yet properly handle non-diffuse surfaces for the most part. There are some experiments, but they're way behind in other aspects.

And I'm not even talking real-time. So, yeah, uncanny valley or teleprompter it is.

> put the webcam behind the display

The first time I saw an optical finger print sensor under a glass display, that was my immediate hope that it would kick off an under-glass optics explosion.

> everyone gets to make direct eye contact again!

As someone who doesn't always have "good" days with eye-contact, being forced to do that feels a bit terrifying.

As someone who doesn't always have "good" days with eye-contact

Same here. In addition, I find when I'm forced to make eye contact for a prolonged time (> 2 min), my eyes get exhausted.

Could you have got the wrong idea about eye contact?

People don't generally make sustained eye contact for multi minute periods. Even 10 seconds is generally viewed as a long time: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.160086

Definitely not talking about sustained 2 min eye contact. That would have been torture.

Nobody's forcing you to make eye contact. :) You can still be totally free to not look directly at the person while talking to them.

I mean, in normal conversation it's not like you're making constant eye contact anyways. If you did, you'd come across as a total psychopath.

It's just so that when you want to make eye contact, you have that choice!

now i figured why i creep people out

Gazing at people is usually part of power play or makes people feel you want the control or don't trust them. Some people will feel uncomfortable to even look at you if your gaze fixates them.

Give people a chance to have an "unobserved" look at you — this makes no sense, but might make things less tense.

This is btw. a very common error bad/inexperienced actors make: they have more eye contact with the other person than would be normal in that situation. If you observe people in their natural habitat (e.g. two strangers meeting), many look at something else while talking and only have short gazes at each other in order to check if the words arrived. Sometimes there are longer periods of looking at each other but it is nearly never all the time, unless it is some sort of power play.

Visionox is already doing this in an upcoming cell phone design:

https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/07/01/visionox-under-screen-...

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but would that work? I'm assuming (it wasn't clear) the goal there would be to display the person's whole face in a non-distracting way. But if the OLEDs are transparent and they're projecting the image that person's face, the projection would be both forwards and backwards, so the camera would just capture the space between that person's eyes instead of you.

Can transparent OLED's have a unidirectional display?

DIY Perks did an interesting mod for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AecAXinars Basically a box and a two way mirror.

"And finally everyone gets to make direct eye contact again!"

And enjoy crappy contrast. For special purposes those transparent displays can be amazingly useful but as a generic monitor, thanks but no thanks.

I think the OLEDs shipping in Samsung's phones are already transparent to a degree. They are able to put light sensor, proximity sensor and finger print sensor behind the screen. The can see through the screen. It's only a matter of time before they are able to put a full camera behind the display.

and here I am the simple science fiction fan who sees us closing in on the possibility of having large portions of our phones being wholly see through, so as with OLED televisions you tuck all your electronics at the bottom and the top half is glorious thin and soon transparent screen

Phones in the Expanse are like that. :)

What do you mean "again"? Who stares into each other's eyes? Is your lover far away?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/22/facetime-eye-cont...

Looks like eye contact correction will come earlier than a hardware upgrade.

Why worry about better horse bridles (Webcams) when the automobile is beginning to roll out ($300 PC-free VR)?

VR won't have a picture of your face at all. How does that help with eye contact?

It will (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y), and VR already conveys MUCH more of the micro-interactions of being with people that we are unknowingly blind to in Zoom meetings, which is one reason Zoom meetings are so draining.

How? At best it can take pictures of part of your face. And usually there's a screen inside that headset. Don't you have the exact same problem of needing a camera to be in the middle of the screen? But now it's even worse because the other person's eyes could be anywhere on the screen as you move your head.

Edit: Oh, you have a link now. So it's going to render a fake head based on eye tracking? You can do that without VR!

Just added a video explaining one approach being taken - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y

And that's over a year ago...

Nothing in that depends on a VR headset. You can do that with a normal webcam. It's a completely orthogonal technology.

You can deliver a complete VR experience with just a normal webcam?

You can deliver a rendered avatar based on facial tracking to remove the "camera in the wrong place" eye contact problems, even with normal screens and cameras.

VR makes things immersive, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve the eye contact problem. It's orthogonal.

It's not about just eye contact, but a whole lot of body language that we are totally blind to with a just video of someone who's not even looking at you. This body language is a very important part of communicating and can be mediated with VR.

This blindless in webcam meetings make everyone something like socially "autistic", and is a big part of what can make them much more draining than in-person meetings.

And then we fall into the uncanny valley and go back to how it used to be with no eye contact.

Not sure what you mean? I've used prototypes of this and there's nothing uncanny whatosever about it. It's seriously great.

You can test it yourself one-way by just asking a friend to look into their webcam when talking to you. On your side, it'll look totally normal.

A much more general solution would be a neural net that can alter gaze. Integrate with eye tracking and it becomes even better. Only the user you are looking at would see your direct gaze. Other users would see you looking towards the user you are looking at.

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