Software Brings Eye Contact To Video Chat, With a Little Help From Kinect

Zothecula writes "Skype has been around for ten years now. Once a science fiction dream, the video calling service has 300 million users making two billion minutes of video calls a day. One problem: most of them can't look each other in the eye. Claudia Kuster, a doctoral student at the Computer Graphics Laboratory ETH Zurich, and her team are developing a way to bring eye contact to Skype and similar video services with software that alters the caller's on-screen image to give the illusion that they're looking straight at the camera."

Comments

Sometimes the easy way is the better way

[3D-nut]

Why not put a half-silvered mirror (plate beamsplitter) at a 45 degree angle to the screen, a piece of black velvet beyond the beamsplitter as a light trap, and point the camera so it sees your face reflected in the glass? Like a teleprompter.

Don't mess with the eyes

[Russ1642]

They're putting out software that changes what your eyes look like so that it looks like you're not looking up a little bit. This will not work. It will make people's eyes look wrong and creepy. We are perfectly attuned to looking at eyes and anything that's a bit off will get noticed immediately. Start by fixing people's teeth or something but not the eyes.

Re:there's always looking right at the camera

[asylumx]

If both people are only looking at the camera, why bother even displaying a picture at all? Nobody is looking at it... Except the NSA perhaps.

Which is false reality..

[Lumpy]

Most people do not make Eye contact when talking, people look at the other persons mouth mostly aiming the eyes at the center of the face. direct eye contact is seen as agressive even in the human species.