 "New eye-tracking technology makes Skype calls more natural")
Skype has become an integral part of most people’s lives. However, the experience of video chatting is not quite the best yet, with stationary cameras making it difficult to maintain eye contact with the person you’re chatting with.
While most people would rather look at the video feed during a Skype call, the positioning of most cameras makes it look like you’re avoiding eye contact. A new piece of technology is about to change this predicament. Worked upon by the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH Zurich has developed a software that recognises your face and rotates it. Essentially, this piece of technology will make it look like you’re looking right into the camera and making eye contact, when in reality you’re just looking at the screen.
The software will make it look like you’re maintaining eye contact
“We want to make video conference calls as similar as possible to a real meeting,” said Claudia Kuster, a doctoral student at the Computer Graphics Laboratory ETH Zurich about how this software came into being. If the software in its current form has to be put inside your living room, your webcams – quite like the Kinect – should have the ability to measure depth. Not a lot of webcams come with depth sensors currently, thanks to the high price tag it comes saddled with.
Till now only larger companies have been able to afford being able to create artificial eye contact, especially when it comes to video conferences. The one piece of technology for consumers that possibly comes close is the Kinect. The motion sensing input device for Xbox 360 and Windows PC manages to collect colour and depth based information from rooms. Unlike the solutions, Kuster and her team came up with earlier, the software turns only your face and not the entire image. If the camera loses sight of your face for a bit, it will leave the image as is.
If the project does manage to reach your webcams, be prepared to have a lot better interactions and eye-to-eye conversations. And no, this is not a cue for Taher Shah to write a new song.
With inputs from agencies.
_Cover image credit: Getty Images
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