Let's hope Apple's webkit for their AR glasses incorporates the ability to easily look at 3D like objects from 2D pages with a simple tilt of your head.
Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
251–260 of 277 posts
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#252Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand’s website and being presented with a miniature virtual storefront. You could look at their most popular products as if you were standing on a sidewalk peering into their shop. I imagined this as instructed as was simultaneously bored and depressed. Why does it always have to be about shopping.
It's a relatively invasive technique that requires a computer's camera to record details of a person's face, and that's marketable data that any commercial shopping site would likely collect and sell on to other parties. It'd be much simpler to implement arrow key / spacebar navigation through a 3D scene (still computationally expensive relative to rendering the standard HTML/CSS/JS page), but then that data couldn't…
An awful lot of us already wear glasses, whether prescription or blue light blocking.
If tiny IR lights or something else distinctive that the camera could recognize on the glasses could be used instead of actual eye/face tracking, I'll bet even more people would wear them.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#253Here's a demo from about 3 years ago that does something similar to the experiment in the article: https://compassionate-murdock-82fdbb.netlify.app/
It's interesting to see that these face detection models have been getting a lot better over the past couple of years, making it easier to stable and cheap webcam-based tracking.
That said, if you look closely at the videos in the original article, there's some noticeable delay between the camera moving and the program responding. The original wii controller based prototype that this was based off doesn't suffer from this delay because it used infrared LEDs. It's annoying to have to place those somewhere near your face, but once you have them there the face tracking because basically instant.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#254Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand’s website and being presented with a miniature virtual storefront. You could look at their most popular products as if you were standing on a sidewalk peering into their shop. I imagined this as instructed as was simultaneously bored and depressed. Why does it always have to be about shopping.
It's a relatively invasive technique that requires a computer's camera to record details of a person's face, and that's marketable data that any commercial shopping site would likely collect and sell on to other parties. It'd be much simpler to implement arrow key / spacebar navigation through a 3D scene (still computationally expensive relative to rendering the standard HTML/CSS/JS page), but then that data couldn't…
It is not imaging your face like a normal camera would. It is using an infrared camera to pick out the location of two dots (the relative position and distance of the two dots in the camera”s field of view). That information stream could be compressed to a few bytes per second without losing tracking fidelity. That does not seem very invasive. Even if a high resolution pixel stream were to be sent from the camera to an untrustworthy, persistence layer, it would be infrared, which doesn’t seem very privacy-invasive.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately it's stuff like this that's poisoned otherwise cool new tech for me. I can't help but wonder "how will this be used to advertise to me?"
> I can't help but wonder "how will this be used to advertise to me?" Or lie to you? VR storefront eh? Bet the product will look a lot better than it actually does in real life.
I mean, that's true today. I'm sure you've seen plenty of shops egregiously misrepresenting the sizes of products via forced perspective or outright editing in images. If they were to upload a 3D model it would only get more difficult to mislead about the physical characteristics of the product.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a relatively invasive technique that requires a computer's camera to record details of a person's face, and that's marketable data that any commercial shopping site would likely collect and sell on to other parties. It'd be much simpler to implement arrow key / spacebar navigation through a 3D scene (still computationally expensive relative to rendering the standard HTML/CSS/JS page), but then that data couldn't…
"Details of a person's face is marketable data". Okay, it's not that I don't believe you, but what do they do with that data? How does it help? Unless you're marketing acne cream, I suppose.
Knowing exactly where the user is looking is pretty good data I would say.
"User looked at the buy button 5 times in the session but they did not buy" and so on.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#257Cynical take: Seems like an excuse for Shopify to add eye tracking to product pages for ad analytics
I think it's important to remember that Shopify doesn't have a singular ad product. It's a platform to build a web store on, and merchants can add whatever they want to their shop, but Shopify doesn't collect any data across shops. That's the shop's data, not Shopify's. Bias: my team at Shopify helps merchants launch their shop and get their initial sales.
Does Shopify have a sales team? Does Shopify have a marketing team?
What's a more likely and more powerful pitch that the marketing team could use to better increase sales of the Shopify platform given this tool they've developed:
1. You can make your stores more FUN! With this little funny tool. 2. You can have more accurate tracking data on what your user is looking at at every moment when they're browsing your website's catalog.
Why not both, really? It's not in Shopify's interest to keep eye-tracking data, but it is in their interest to encourage people to use this feature because we all know this kind of data is a selling point for an e-commerce business.
You really sound like the gun manufacturer that, after a mass shooting, says it's not the people that are flooding the market with guns that are the problem but the individual that did the shooting. This discourse might resonate with some, but not me I guess.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#258It’s possible to just convert the iris model to onnx then to tfjs btw. I got 90% the way to doing it once but basically concluded it’s entirely feasible
Heh. This is funny.
I'm not saying you're wrong but don't fall prey to a common misconception: difficulty in a project is not always linear, and the first 90% might be very simple whereas the remaining 10% of the task might be the most difficult and time consuming of the project.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#259Coming from Shopify, this feels like a ZIRP (zero interest rate project). i.e. projects that need not bear any fruit in the next many years. Snark aside, this looks very cool, and I definitely see use cases in gaming (and maybe in web home pages--assuming you could get the client to turn on the web cam for an unknown site). In the article I see no mention of accelerometers. Can one get nearly the same effect on mobil…
Sure - there are 3d-effect backgrounds available currently. Apple offers this as an OS feature since iOS 7: Parallax / Perspective Zoom for wallpaper. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/parallax-and-the-ios-7-wallpap...
Adding in Selfie-cam eye tracking should be relatively doable too.
Could then be added to an app, a game, or to the UI layer of a phone.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to pull a print/graphic designer card and say that "minimalism" isn't actually a style. I think I understand how it's being used in this conversation as a shorthand for "2002-2012 Google UI", which had a massive impact on the way people thought about web design. But I don't think it's fair to say that the reason for the staying power of that particular type of minimalist design is simple repetition or consi…
Saying that designers are lazy and its their fault is a weak argument. For sure not all of them are lazy. Most of the time they are told what to produce. What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this. So dont blame the designer but the boss/ma…
I'm sympathetic to working in big corporate structures as a designer where diktats you disagree with come down from on high. So I'm not blaming individual designers here. But I do blame art departments for not fighting back against non-artistic managerial marketing decisions, and some of that blame rests on art directors for capitulating, and some of it rests on designers for not making their opinions heard to the art directors. From a corporate standpoint, listening to your marketing team instead of your design department - and instead of having an open door to designers to walk in with ideas - is extremely limiting. It's not making the most of your resources. But design departments get a certain kind of laziness in their culture once it's the case that no one upstairs is going to listen, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.