ceargaest

ceɑꞃᵹæꞅꞇ

@ceargaest

[tʃæɑ̯rˠɣæːst]

linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.

since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!

log inask
username etymology
bosworthtoller.com/5952
ceargaest
@ceargaest
atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs
eieio
@eieio

cooking up a game about eye contact

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.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @eieio's post:

eieio
@eieio

I'm definitely going to add local tracking of you blinking vs them blinking (and probably a timer where if neither of you blinks for 30 seconds the connection is cut anyway or something)!

I've been pretty split about global leaderboards - on the one hand it'd be super fun, on the other hand I think it'd lead to way more abuse and it'd make this feel a little more gamey and a little less artsy and idk if that's the vibe I want. Not sureeee

login to reply
eieio
@eieio

Ya the nice part of having this in a gallery (or any physical space; wondering if I can convince the indie arcades in New York to set this up) is that you don't have to think about abuse in the same way.

I'm clearly doing some stuff to try to make this hard to abuse, but still! It's the internet! I can be dumb. If it was sufficiently popular I'm sure someone would break something.

login to reply
eieio
@eieio

lol. I mean I struggle with (and am totally fascinated by) eye contact, which is pretty directly what lead to this game!

Although one thing working on it has emphasized to me is that eye contact really is different over the computer - I don't get the same (uncomfortable/interesting) feeling looking into someone's eyes on a webcam.

login to reply