Experimental Camera

Design Process

For our moderation in D4TC, we choose to address zoom fatigue, one of the reasons stated in this article(insidehighered.com/advice/2020/04/22/professor-explores-why-zoom-classes-deplete-her-energy-opinion) people are always ‘at attention’ for obvious reasons. We combined this idea with using emojis as a way to express our personalities in light of online learning. So in class we had everyone change their zoom video to a custom emoji. I think this helped in decreasing zoom fatigue and increasing participation in our presentation. After the moderation, I was thinking about the limitations we faced in using static emojis. Since our mood varies all the time I wanted to see if there was a way to represent ourselves using the same idea but a more flexible method. I used clm tracker arrays to track my face and pulled in the pixels. You can make the pixels smaller to get a better detail in facial reactions or larger pixels that conceals it further. I experimented with a few effects but my favorite one was just removing the background. The pixels have a constant trail of the updating and moving pixels. This was an effect I was initially wanted to replicate when I first experimented with facial tracking to try and recreate similar effects to some of Zach Lieberman’s filters. Although This seems slightly too distracting for a zoom video filter, it still maintains the idea of facial expression without feeling constantly monitored. I left it in as an option that can be switched on or off by the mouse position.

Screenshots of camera with varying degrees of detail

Reflection

The zoom fatigue reason covered in the process reminds me of an excerpt from Amy Suo Wu’s reading a few weeks ago. The example of ‘relentless gaze’ where in the position of a guard tower in relation to the prison made it feel like there was constant surveillance. I find it interesting that the effects are very similar in zoom classes although the pressure is enforced by us. If we try to translate it to the ‘real’ classroom environment, it feels unnatural and impossible. It’s funny to think that in a classroom, recreating the zoom layout would require us to sit face to face with everyone the whole time. In relation to this code, I tried to follow the pseudo code as closely as I could to understand my strengths and limitations of the program. This allowed me to raise questions and find solutions to even simple methods that I have overlooked in my urgency to ‘get going’ with the program.