Imagine having a face-to-face conversation with someone who will not, or cannot, make eye contact with you. Trust, a sense of connection and the certainty that you're even being listened to are vastly diminished. Yet we've all grown used to Zoom calls where no one is making eye contact, as webcam locations don't jive with the screen, and we've come to accept it as a limitation of the technology. Has our trust and confidence suffered as a result?

The engineers at Nvidia think so, and thus have been hard at work on a feature called Eye Contact. This is a filter that uses an AI-based algorithm to essentially re-render your eyes as if they're pointed directly at the camera.

If you turn your head or look far enough away, the software knows better than to leave your eyeballs floating in space; if your eyes cross the "successful gaze redirection" threshold, the software lets your eyes move with you, and smooths out the transition "to mimic the typical motion of human eyes."

And obviously, the feature can also come in handy if you're recording a presentation and are reading off of a teleprompter.

The feature's full name is NVIDIA Maxine Eye Contact. Developers can download an SDK here (Windows and Linux), and the feature is already available for those who use the NVIDIA Broadcast App.

via petapixel