I've been hacking on a game about holding eye contact with a stranger. The rules are:
- Activate your webcam and close your eyes for a bit to join the queue.
- You're paired with a stranger.
- No video is shown if the game can't detect a face.
- All video is automatically cropped to show just the face.
- No audio, no text chat, just video.
- The feed is cut as soon as one of you blinks.
And, uh, it works! This video is me playing against myself on a second laptop next to me.
I have received feedback like "oh my god I will never play this" and "this is horrifying" while developing it. Which, yeah, fair. I think ideally this would go in an exhibit (or set of exhibits), somewhere or otherwise be tied to specific hardware, but I'm kinda tempted to just put it online with the ability to restrict who you match with somehow.
The face detection is driven by mediapipe and video is exchanged peer-to-peer via WebRTC.