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Live Avatars with face-api.js
- rlargman 7y agoVery cool! I love the idea of reactive avatars. In general, I find it annoying to have to upload a profile photo, so being able to select an avatar, and then have it be responsive, is great.
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks!!!
- carocaroz 7y agoThis is awesome! Love the idea and definitely solves for a need.
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks!!!
- mrcoles 7y agoLove this! Are you exploring more variations in the avatar expressions or does keeping it more limited work better? Also, are there any unexpected positive or negative outcomes so far? For example, do people feel pressured to smile or anything else like that?
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks! I'm still exploring for sure - but there are benefits to some of the limits. I'd love a more realtime mode for when people are actually in a conversation in our product, but haven't gotten that working perfectly yet. We initially felt pressure to smile before I made the default a pseudo-smile (check out the three faces in the blog post). Now the "neutral" face looks somewhat happy so no more complaints.
- sudosteph 7y agoI don't understand how this is desirable at all. It seems distracting and kinda creepy. But I'm also creeped out by those talking faces in the iPhone commercials, so maybe I'm just way out of the loop on this matter due to being on the autism spectrum. I just don't want to know the faces my coworkers are making when I'm not talking to them, and I don't want to think about how they may be perceiving my face when I'm not talking to them.
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks for the comment. I'm not sure it's for everyone. I also made an option for the avatar without the facial recognition, so it just grays out if your keyboard/mouse doesn't fire for 15s.
- sudosteph 7y agoThe tech is actually quite cool. Like I could see it being used to make a game for kids that they "play" by trying to match expressions or something. I just personally would not feel comfortable working at a job where usage of this was expected, even if I could manually control the image.
- krsdcbl 7y agoI actually thought this might be a cool solution exactly because of people feeling that way - if you think streaming, for example, or video calls, where you'd rather not like to be streaming your actual face, technology like this might make it easier to convey a more natural dialogue whilst retaining more privacy
- tbirdz 7y agoI don't understand the reason for the facial expressions. Isn't everyone just going to be neutral 99% of the time when they are just working by themselves on the computer?
- dsaffy 7y agoThey are a lot of the time in practice. For us, the movement with a little facial recognition change is just a piece of the puzzle. We also added (optional) integrations like Spotify and Slack and are working on more to give other signals. Overall goal is to help with loneliness of remote work and make people feel more comfortable just starting audio / video conversations with one another.
- chrisa 7y agoI think this is super neat! And I could really see a use case for when bandwidth is a problem for true video calls... next to full video, streaming the avatar info would be next to nothing - so it could turn "video" calls into basically just the audio as far as the internet connection is concerned. Awesome!
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks! I'm working on making it more real-time... would love to satisfy that use case even better.
- NikkiA 7y agoAnd yet another step towards an internet that is actively hostile to those that don't want to be permanently represented by their real life stupid ugly face. Bravo.
- rlargman 7y agoBut that's the point, it isn't your real life face, only the avatar you chose, so you don't have to show your face if you don't want to.
- ibudiallo 7y agoSide note: this reminds me of a passage in The Machine Stops, by E M Forster (1909). > “In the air-ship —” He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people — an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something “good enough” had long since been accepted by our race.
- jampekka 7y agoThe expression sample seems a bit dystopic. The "normal" face has a huge smile, whereas the "sad" looks more neutral. May be a cultural thing, but it's not very common to see people with the "normal" looking expression outside genuinely happy situations or where one fakes such situation for sustinence or monetary gain.
- dsaffy 7y agoYeah... I mostly just went off feel. Since most of the time people working are "neutral", and the "neutral" looks pretty serious / not super happy, it just made a bad vibe for the team for everyone to be looking mopey. So I switched it to be a bit happier. The half-empty view is that it's "fake happiness" but the half-full view is that it better conveys your intent to your team, that you are (hopefully) happy to be hanging out and getting work done with them. A wall of smiles also makes people feel more welcome and included than a wall of meh. Still room to play with this though.
- Gracana 7y agoThis is pretty neat. I think it would be great as a chat heads up display feature for video games.. your avatar could be a creature or a character from the game or whatever you wanted.
- dsaffy 7y agoThat's a cool idea!
- the8472 7y agofacerig + live2d webgl should be able to do this already, in higher quality to boot.
- vwee 7y agoFrom your images it looks like there's a Spotify integration (logo in avatar's top right corner). How's that work? Does clicking it send you to the user's music stream, or can you join the stream, send you to their profile? Anyway, I like the idea - brings a personal touch to the user's virtual office presence.
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks! Right now, it's just a hover that shows what they're playing. But would be cool to sync you up with them on click.
- bwb 7y agoVery cool, really digging it!
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks! Appreciate you giving it a look.
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoI rather love this idea. It is a rather elegant solution to the problem of "how do we provide office like presence". I work for a not-heavily distributed company but we have some permanent remote and some WFH days. We never turn on the video for our zoom meetings. However most of these people we see regularly, so not a huge deal. On the flip side my wife works for a heavily distributed company and their solution is "you must always have video on for zoom". It's not a bad idea, but sometimes you can't or don't want to have video on - especially when you're call is at 7am (or earlier) to support people in timezones farther ahead. It would be awesome to have a little dashboard of my teammates with decent integrations (like shown) to know when they are actually around and have some feeling of teamdom... without having my video or audio on all the time. Having video on for long duration is certainly a lot creepier than working in an office.
- bearton 7y agoHave you thought of using this for online classrooms/e-learning? Could be a neat use case.