For anyone who doesn’t think a year spent working and socializing through video calling could get worse, check out Eyecam: a anthropomorphic robotic webcam designed to look like a human eyeball that he even blinks and looks around the room. Maybe phone calls and email weren’t so bad after all?
The Eyecam was developed by a team of researchers led by Marc Teyssier at the Human-computer interaction laboratory at the University of Saarland in Germany. If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because Teyssier was also the researcher behind one smartphone covered in artificial leather that a person could interact with physical touches, punches, touches and even pinches. It allowed you to convey emotional intentions to a device that otherwise cannot recognize these indications. For some reason, we thought it was as creepy as technology could get, but Teyssier has once again shown us that we were wrong.
He the research will be presented in the next ACM CHI 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems. The goal is not to scare everyone away from video conferencing apps like Zoom and Skype — though no one would blame these researchers for being the end of the game — but to bring the emotional connection humans experience during individual conversations to our current situation where these interactions are not recommended.
Inside the EyecThe Am Artificial Eyeball is a cannibalized sensor and webcam lens really surrounded by a fake silicone skull that allows for functional eyelids and an animated eyebrow powered by six electric servos representing the muscles. An Arduino Nano controls all the movements of the engines while a Raspberry Pi Zero allows this monstrous creation to interface with a PC like an old USB webcam. It is completely open source and you can download all the digital files needed to create your own GitHub. An instructional video of the entire construction process is still in progress.
The Eyecit more or less looks like a real human eye (minus the rest of the human being), but the real goal of this research is to make it move and react like a real human eye does to create a stronger emotional connection with a person you are is only seen on the screen. It is reminiscent of the robot created by Disney Research designed to simulate a realistic human gaze by reproducing the subtle movements that humans unconsciously perform. This could be the result of their lungs filling and emptying with air or involuntary reflexes that reacted to nearby sounds or movements, causing them to break their gaze.
By using facial tracking, there are some interesting future applications for EyecI am Instead of appearing just to randomly look around the room during a video call, the eye movements of the person a user is calling could be mapped and played by the EecI’m watching, creating a deeper emotional connection. A hardware upgrade could even introduce the possibility of the robot eye being launched when things become especially emotional. Even with this thing on top of your computer, you’ll probably want to do everything you can to keep a conversation light and jovial so that it doesn’t rain tears on your precious hardware.
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