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Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

webdesign.maratz.com

31–40 of 61 posts

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#31

This is an impressive demo however I usually move my face closer to the screen because the font is too small. It would be neat to see a demo of parallax using a webcam.

Check out http://auduno.github.com/headtrackr/examples/targets.html (though you'll need webgl support)

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#33

Neat, but this completely ignores the real reason people have trouble with small fonts: bad eyesight. The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight. The real solution is to just use the default font size and have users adjust that to their preferences.

I wonder if, with a good enough camera, you could detect people with non-ideal vision by watching their eyes and "anti-blur" the screen in such a way that it's perfectly in focus for their eyes and head position?

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#34

Neat, but this completely ignores the real reason people have trouble with small fonts: bad eyesight. The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight. The real solution is to just use the default font size and have users adjust that to their preferences.

> The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight.

And the PPI of the monitor/viewing device.

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#35
post #32

The face tracking didn't work well at all for me. Maybe I have an odd face.

Lighting is pretty important for the quality of the face tracking. If it doesn't work first time, try reinitializing a couple of times, the face detector tends to lock onto other objects than the face some times.

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#36

Neat, but this completely ignores the real reason people have trouble with small fonts: bad eyesight. The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight. The real solution is to just use the default font size and have users adjust that to their preferences.

I wonder if, with a good enough camera, you could detect people with non-ideal vision by watching their eyes and "anti-blur" the screen in such a way that it's perfectly in focus for their eyes and head position?

This is a really interesting thought! It's something that probably wasn't viable before the advent of High-DPI displays. Making it worth the effort in a real-world (rather than lab-based) setting is probably insanely difficult though.

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#37
post #34

Neat, but this completely ignores the real reason people have trouble with small fonts: bad eyesight. The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight. The real solution is to just use the default font size and have users adjust that to their preferences.

> The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight. And the PPI of the monitor/viewing device.

and the ambient light conditions, the amount of sleep someone has had, color blindness (could be classified as bad eyesight), the actual size of the screen (for scrolling/line length), the font itself, the amount of experience the reader has with the latin script, the quality of font hinting, the quality of sub-pixel rendering, the quality of kerning.

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#38

Neat, but this completely ignores the real reason people have trouble with small fonts: bad eyesight. The size the font needs to be is a factor of distance and eyesight. The real solution is to just use the default font size and have users adjust that to their preferences.

I wonder if, with a good enough camera, you could detect people with non-ideal vision by watching their eyes and "anti-blur" the screen in such a way that it's perfectly in focus for their eyes and head position?

That only works if your screen can produce a lightfield. Maybe future 3D screens will have such a feature.

Re: Realtime Responsive Typography Based on Viewing Distance via Webcam

#40
post #15

Great idea, a couple of small improvements would make it even better: * Use a moving average, to avoid flickery transitions * Animate the text to the target size rather than changing in steps. This would mitigate the flickering problem too.

Hi, creator of the headtrackr library here. As far as the headtrackr library goes, it does include a smoother (moving average) to avoid jittering of the tracking. It's set pretty low by default though, since heavy smoothing will lead to lag in tracking sudden movements. Any kind of moving average is a trade-off between responsiveness and smoothness, unfortunately...
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