Imagine, 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.
The blog we are reading right now is Shopify's blog, so I have a theory.
Another interesting question is "Why is shopify's blog the place talking about this, instead of somewhere else?" I remember that demo... it was amazing and then it did go nowhere. With modern face recognition and tracking, it should be entirely possible to use it for some nifty no-touch experiences.
The blog we are reading right now is Shopify's blog
tbh I gave up reading after the bit I quoted and hadnt actually clocked it was a Shopify blog (didnt spot the little icon in the corner or look at the url)
Still, I stand by my refrain "Why does it always have to be about shopping" as a refrain that is rarely out of place
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 be collected.
In general interactive 3D on the web still uses too much computational power on the client-side for most devices.
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.
It wouldn't be so bad if it were a browser feature, i.e. a website can use an "Eye Tracking" API instead of the Camera API (with permission granted), and get limited data.
Couldn’t this sort of thing be built into the browser which could then just expose an API for head orientation and eye position without any privacy invading details?
Physically you'd still need to have the camera on, and having the "your webcam is in use" LED become ever-presently on defeats the ability to detect when the camera is actually being used as a camera.
People who fit into <some racial/ethnic/age/gender bucket> spend more time looking at <x products>, fed to advertisers who can tie it to swathes of your other online activity
Even if it’s _theoretically_ coarse data/bucketing, that adds up to a lot of data to help deanonymization and targeting. Even if that’s done in the spirit of “just for ads”, it’s not a big leap to political targeting etc, and with the right data leaks, potentially even actual harassment.
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.
Imagine the possibilities! If you have enough facial expressions, looked for n ms, moved head n yards, with enough a-b testing you could dynamically design products. Like Weird Science only worse.
It's published by Shopify, so in this case it's because it likely would not have gotten published otherwise. Unfortunately E-commerce companies are not known for their "research for the fun of research".
Disagree, VR stuff at Shopify really strikes me and a lot of folks as a pet project with unlikely business outcome but they still do it for the kick of it.
Or, imagine your head tracking data is being uploaded and sold to the hugest bidder! They could tell whether you have a health condition which they could sell you an expensive drug for! Or raise your insurance rates! Wow this IS exciting.
The smart watches already provide a lot more data such as heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and activity monitor to name a few things. However, it’s just a part of the little data collector that nearly everyone has in their pocket.
My point is we’re already there and we’ve been here for years now. If laws like the GPRD passed, then it should be possible to counter or neutralize the problem
It has to be about shopping because pr0n actually drives new tech and that venue would not be pr0n friendly.
I would imagine this would be an obvious easy sell for CAD, so there must be something wrong with it, perhaps a patent, holding back progress. I will say that I've done CAD for projects (woodworking and making STL models for 3d printer) and people who do not CAD think that CAD people look at 3d animations 99% of the time, but IRL when I do CAD I spend most of my time thinking very abstractly (how to balance the spacing of power supply and PCB such that it looks nice, is easy to access, thermal concerns, wire routing... Or I can look up the clearance hole dia for a 4-40 screw now what is a common drill size with sane tolerances to drill it, how about an eighth of an inch?)
Because this is from someone who works for Shopify and has to justify their 20% project to their bosses.
Why can’t people have a little more imagination and see this as a great new data visualization UX like for things like charts or maps, instead of automatically panning it to death?
I imagined this as instructed as was simultaneously bored and depressed.
Why does it always have to be about shopping.