Reminds me of this. Tl;dr ask questions, stare into eyes for 4 minutes, fall in love.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231030202322/https://www.nytim...
It's not loading for me either
A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
11–20 of 92 posts
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#12I tried it 4 times. 3 times, I got "the stranged hid their face", which I understood as they weren't showing a face at all?
Anyway, I met with someone for a few seconds and it was a strange experience. No audio, no text, only communicating through face gestures, it was fun :)
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#13I tried it 4 times. 3 times, I got "the stranged hid their face", which I understood as they weren't showing a face at all? Anyway, I met with someone for a few seconds and it was a strange experience. No audio, no text, only communicating through face gestures, it was fun :)
yeah, that message plays if the face detection can't find a face. It's a little wonky because on their end the face detection gets their whole webcam (and then crops to just the face) - but the cropped version is all that's transmitted to you (I thought it'd be deceptive to transmit more). SOmetimes the face detection struggles to find a face in the cropped face. But I thought cutting the video there was safer than letting it through.
Glad you had a fun and weird experience with your other play session. That's certainly the intended experience.
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#14Needs Queensrÿche.
In silent lucidity, dreams take flight,
A canvas of stars, a tranquil night.
Whispers of moonbeams, soft and wide,
Guiding the soul on a cosmic tide.
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#15This is hilarious. Can’t keep a straight face for anything, though.
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#16Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#17Ha, I went to submit a 'Show HN' about this and someone had beat me to posting it :) I've been hacking on stranger.video for the last couple of weeks. One big design goal was to build something omegle-like that I'd be a little more comfortable using (thus there's no audio, no text chat, video is limited to faces, video cuts if it can't find a face, if you don't like what's on screen close your eyes and it disappears,…
Very cool stuff! Definitely feels like an intersection of art and programming. Not a lot of websites I pull up make me feel like I am connecting with an actual person staring back at me, however brief. Quite likely because, well, they're not. Written words are a kind of connection, one way video is a kind of connection, but two way is it's own whole thing obviously and a type of feeling that is novel in my web browsing. I know chatroulette and omegle did it first, but still the feeling is so outside of the norm of using the internet that it feels novel.
I think you definitely captured some of the intimidating vibe that unbroken direct eye contact with a stranger can create. It was very fun though. I enjoyed seeing people's facial expressions go from neutral while staring at their own face, to lighting up once they are looking directly at another person who is also trying to not blink. The eyebrow wiggles or nose contortions people pulled in order to emote while not blinking was also very fun.
I was beaming a huge smile back at folks, and eventually used a sticky note to write !iH and put it on my nose. Definitely got some reactions from that haha.
Yes, some folks are using a virtual webcam to just show a static stock image of a person's face (cowards!). But I got some unique real humans.
The disconnect is really quick, and felt like maybe there's some bugs. In terms of, folks would frequently disconnect quickly. I don't think I ever SAW anyone blink, so likely the stream is cut off immediately and the blinking frames aren't sent? I'd love to be able to see someone blink in this before they go away. Even a freeze frame of that would be nice. Grounding them going away with the human expression of blinking would help keep me in the experience, cutting away without seeing the action that caused them to "lose" breaks the experience for me.
Very cool project though! I'm not sure how often I've written code that makes a human _feel something human_ that isn't frustration haha.
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video feed showing the stranger's face doesn't seem to be working, but the inputs taken from my own camera (blinks) do. Is there a way to fix that issue on my end?
I think this is likely an issue with the way that I am (trying to) set up the (ideally) peer to peer video connection. One thing you could try is to switch to a mobile device using data if you're having trouble matching with folks from your wifi; it's possible that firewalls are causing problems. but i also definitely have more work to do to pair people in a more intelligent way so that video is likely to actually wo…
Whoa Peer to Peer connections with
strangers is scary stuff that almost no one would volunteer for. I get the bandwidth reasons to do it but everyone should know this is peer to peer before connecting and know the risks of being hacked/stalked as they expose their IP to strangers. I would put a huge disclaimer about it, which I didn't see on your site.
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#19site worked fine for me, but Im curious as to why 7 seconds without blinking and what significance of that is ?
Re: A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger
#20Ha, I went to submit a 'Show HN' about this and someone had beat me to posting it :) I've been hacking on stranger.video for the last couple of weeks. One big design goal was to build something omegle-like that I'd be a little more comfortable using (thus there's no audio, no text chat, video is limited to faces, video cuts if it can't find a face, if you don't like what's on screen close your eyes and it disappears,…
Very cool stuff! Definitely feels like an intersection of art and programming. Not a lot of websites I pull up make me feel like I am connecting with an actual person staring back at me, however brief. Quite likely because, well, they're not. Written words are a kind of connection, one way video is a kind of connection, but two way is it's own whole thing obviously and a type of feeling that is novel in my web browsi…
A friend last night floated a similar idea re: cutting off too fast - it'd be great to get sent a slo-mo of them blinking. I think you're totally right that it cuts too quickly and would gain a lot there.
In general I am very very quick to cut and I think that contributes both to the experience feeling worse and to some of the bugs (there are definitely bugs!). The blink detection is also super finicky - blinks are just really fast, and if I dial down the sensitivity it's super easy to miss obvious blinks entirely.
I'm glad this is resonating with some folks though. I wasn't sure before building it if it would, and this gives me a reason to iterate on and improve it :)