For those who have trouble maintaining eye contact, a new feature of the updated FaceTime app on iOS 13 will soon come to the rescue.
It appears Apple is testing this new feature out at the moment, one that will help users fake intimacy during video calls. In the third developer version of iOS 13 beta, someone found a thing called FaceTime Attention Correction, which corrects the user's gaze to make it look as if they're staring into the camera.
FaceTime Attention Correction
App designer Mike Rundle was among the first to point the feature out, on Twitter. Software engineer Dave Schukin also took to the platform to note that the feature uses Apple's ARKit "to grab a depth map/position of your face, and adjusts the eyes accordingly." He also shared a video of how this process works.
How iOS 13 FaceTime Attention Correction works: it simply uses ARKit to grab a depth map/position of your face, and adjusts the eyes accordingly.
Notice the warping of the line across both the eyes and nose. pic.twitter.com/U7PMa4oNGN — Dave Schukin (@schukin) July 3, 2019
The feature is reportedly only accessible on iPhone XS and XS Max running the beta OS, and it's unclear whether this feature will ever make it past the development stage and become part of iOS 13. Even if that happens, it's not clear if older iPhones will receive the feature. Apple has yet to comment on FaceTime Attention Correction, but make sure to check back with Tech Times as we learn more.
Why Eye Contact Is Important, Even If It's Fake
In an era where digital intimacy has become more prevalent, video calls are among the most intimate forms of communicating online. They're much more dynamic than, say, text-based exchanges — but the way this works is that people are looking at the screen instead of the camera during video calls, which could be weird for both participants as they may feel a disconnect.
Apple's FaceTime Attention Correction feature seems intent to fix this: allowing the person to look at the screen directly and have software do the rest of the dirty work to feign eye contact.
