In video conferences it always seems that you are looking away. Although you look into the eyes of the person on the other side, the problem is that for that other person (or others), you are looking elsewhere. The feeling is that you never look in the eye. Or rather, to the webcam.
The problem causes some “disconnect” in those virtual meetings, but NVIDIA has the solution. The NVIDIA Maxine technology we tested a few months ago is finally being made publicly available, and does it as part of NVIDIA Broadcast.
That platform is available to all RTX family card users, and enables live streams, voice chats, and video conference calls to be enhanced through various features in which artificial intelligence plays a key role.
NVIDIA Broadcast already had notable options: it eliminated noise and echoes, helped position virtual backgrounds, offered automatic framing or eliminated video noise, but now it goes further.
It does so with the option called “Eye Contact”, which is based on NVIDIA Maxine technology and which allows us to look away when the webcam focuses on us, but in the video our eyes always pretend to be looking at the webcam. It is, indeed, as if we are always looking into the eyes of those who are seeing/calling us.
Essentially what this function does is create a “deepfake” of our eyesmodifying that part of our face so that it always seems to be looking at the webcam.
It doesn’t matter where we look: we can be looking at another area of the screen or at another side: as long as our eyes are in the frame, this technology will try to simulate that we are always looking at the webcam, that is, “in the eyes” of our interlocutors .
As we already verified in our tests with Maxine, the result is not perfect and it can make our eyes look somewhat unreal, but the truth is that when well behaved, the feature is truly amazing.
NVIDIA’s own engineers know that the operation has room for improvement, and for this reason they ask that those who detect that it does not work well send a video with their tests to be able to correct and refine its operation.