NVIDIA has made a major announcement as a part of their Special Address at CES 2023. This week, they’ve announced a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that makes a person appear to stay looking at the camera even if they glance away to check notes, etc. It’s a cool, but somewhat scary new feature, and people are already starting to talk about it on social media.
NVIDIA is launching an Eye Contact feature to Broadcast.
It changes the position of your eyes to make them appear to be focused on the camera 👀 pic.twitter.com/lJCa6ubof1
— Gaming Careers (@GamingCareers) January 3, 2023
People were already mentioning variations of this in April of 2021! So it is fascinating to see it coming to life now in 2023.
Nvidia's Maxine AI is insane. It can in real time:
-Give you take eye contact with the camera
-Improve face quality on low bandwidth pic.twitter.com/RDdoaQQ9Ev— Shen Ye (@shen) April 12, 2021
Watch this video which explains ‘Eye Contact’ feature for NVIDIA Broadcast.
In a blog post about all the major updates from NVIDIA this week, they shared this additional information about Eye Contact.
Later this month, Broadcast will add a new Eye Contact feature that can change the position of the subject’s eyes to appear focused on the camera, as well as a new vignette effect. The update also improves the popular virtual background feature, adding temporal information for increased stability. The virtual background improvements can also be found in the recent OBS Studio 29.0 software release, and will be updated SDKs for developers later this week. (source)
What is ‘Eye Contact’?
NVIDIA Broadcast, the app that delivers cutting edge AI-powered voice and video effects, adds Eye Contact – a new feature that uses AI to make it appear as if you’re looking directly at the camera, even when glancing to the side or taking notes. Look for the update later in January. (source)
Essentially this feature allows streamers and people on video calls to look like they are looking directly at the camera. It is a major breakthrough in AI technology and advances to video calls. Though it probably has some work to do. If you look closely, it is still really hard to tell, but one user on YouTube commented:
As long as you don’t look too closely at the eyes you can’t tell, but if you focus on them something just doesn’t look right. (via Mazapine on this YouTube video)
What do you think? Is this a major breakthrough that will have large usage across livestreams and video calls? Or do you think it’s not going to catch on? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts!
The announcement of NVIDIA’s ‘Eye Contact’ AI update to their Broadcast app is an exciting development in the field of video conferencing and broadcasting. With many people continuing to work remotely due to the ongoing pandemic, this update has the potential to improve the virtual communication experience by making it more natural and engaging.
The ‘Eye Contact’ AI feature uses artificial intelligence to adjust the position of the speaker’s eyes in real-time, giving the impression that they are making direct eye contact with the viewer. This can help to create a more personal connection and improve the overall quality of virtual meetings, presentations, and broadcasts.
As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see more developments in the field of AI and video conferencing. This is just one example of how AI can be used to enhance virtual communication, and it will be interesting to see how other companies will respond to this latest update from NVIDIA.