Comment by m-i-l | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m-i-l | Hacker News Reader

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There's another use case towards the end: "Transparent displays could have a place on the desktop—not so you can see through them, but so that a camera can sit behind the display, capturing your image while you’re looking directly at the screen. This would help you maintain eye contact during a Zoom call."

Personally I think that would be a great idea. But from my (non expert) perspective, for eye contact in video calls, I'd have thought a single camera behind a transparent 30" monitor would be little better than a single camera ontop of a 30" monitor, given that you may have multiple faces on screen and have those faces in different places on screen. Maybe a matrix of cameras behind a transparent screen, with gaze detection and eye tracking to determine which to activate at any time?

> a camera can sit behind the display, capturing your image while you’re looking directly at the screen. This would help you maintain eye contact during a Zoom call.

A camera so situated would also capture the contents of the display, not just the display user’s face. Others on the call would see the transparent display user’s face occluded by the display’s output.

I remember maybe 10 years ago seeing a news article about Microsoft having developed a system that uses a camera at both the top and the bottom of a screen, which can then build a 3D model of your face and reconstruct a video in real time of what your face would look like from a virtual camera in the middle of the screen.

I remember thinking it was a massive waste of computing power. And they wanted to put it on a phone.

Wasnt Apple doing this already with a single camera and some minimal machine learning to modify the gaze?

Kind of, but I think they were planning to modify more than just the eyes.

>I remember thinking it was a massive waste of computing power. And they wanted to put it on a phone

Wait until you hear about filters. Making people look better on their phone camera must employ buildings full of engineers.

Oh darn, I forgot about filters. What an absolute waste of battery energy.

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