heironymouscoward's Journal: MDPA/7 - The Gremlin

A blantant theft from a site called Slashdot, with a twist.

The problem with video conferencing is that you can't look your correspondent in the eyes, you're watching the screen while the camera is just a little bit higher.

My solution is the Gremlin, a doll about 12" high with a large, expressive face controlled by a hundred or so tiny motors. Its eyes hold the dual cameras that track the person speaking to it. Its mouth lip-synchs with the voice of the person at the other end. Its facial expressions imitate those of the person at the other end.

It has a reactive skin that changes color under computer control. Using simple rules of highlighting and shading, it can create a fair replica of any person's face.

Both callers find themselves speaking to a realistically expressive face.

The dolls plug into a computer and are sold as simple perhiperals.

Better yet

[turg]

How about some sort of video display which can also be a camera? Or a flat video display which works like a one-way mirror, so a camera can be placed behind it. Hmm. Maybe this could be done now with an actual one-way mirror? Camera behind the mirror and front-project the video image onto the mirror from such an angle that the projector is not shining its light into the camera, while the image is properly placed and proportioned for the viewing angle. That should work but I don't know what the quality of th

Alternative ideas

[GoRK]

Unfortunately the robotic head idea is, from an economic viewpoint anyway, a more expensive solution to a problem that could be more easily solved with a stereo camera pair and an autostereoscopic display on each end of your video conference link.

I somehow believe that when we have the technology to make robotic heads that can mimic anyones face cheaply enough to sell to the masses as a low-bandwidth videoconferencing substitute, we will have neither the video bandwidth problem to make sending the video fe