Cinema with Eye Contact: Nvidia's Eye Contact Technology Applied to Films

A classic problem for all users who stream or spend a lot of time on video conferences is the loss of eye contact: either they look at the camera, or they look at the screen. Nvidia decided to solve this with pure artificial intelligence, integrating a new feature called Eye Contact into its Nvidia Broadcast application. However, the public decided to use the technology in a very different way, transforming classic movie scenes...

The idea of hiding a camera behind the screen is not new by any means. Some smartphone manufacturers have already experimented with this (the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra is an extraordinary example), and I imagine that in the future, monitors for laptops and desktop computers will follow a similar path. What are the advantages? Eliminating the "notch" for smartphones, and in the rest of cases, recovering eye contact.

Until that happens, Nvidia offers an alternative: Eye Contact. This technology is a product of the Nvidia Maxine initiative, which seeks to transform telecommunications with artificial intelligence. Eye Contact is available in the 1.4 version of the Nvidia Broadcast application, and that means one thing: Users are already playing with it.

Nvidia Eye Contact: Breaking the fourth wall with artificial intelligence

The first video is nothing more than Nvidia's official demo for Broadcast 1.4. Just by activating the feature, the program "corrects" the position of our eyes in real time, without affecting other options like artificial backgrounds or blurring. The best "live" evaluation I have found so far was made by "iamfallfromgrace" on YouTube, which includes wearing glasses, angle limits, and basic interferences like passing a hand in front of the face. Latency problems are there, but personally I don't think the result is that terrible.

However, Eye Contact is exploding on Twitter, and its users decided to publish small demos based on famous movies. I would never have thought that an actor maintaining direct eye contact with the camera could be so disturbing... but look at Jurassic Park: Doctor Grant is 60 seconds away from becoming a serial killer. The second test is even scarier. Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Javier Bardem as Anton in No Country for Old Men... they need no introduction.

Those who wish to do their own tests with Eye Contact will find the official Nvidia Broadcast link below, but the app and its features are GPU-accelerated, requiring at least an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card.

Download Nvidia Broadcast: Click here