This is so delightfully steampunk, right out of Brazil. The whirring sound is perfect, now it just needs pneumatic tubes!

I don't understand why we do not yet have several notebooks on the market with multiple webcams around the sides of the display. That way a video conference with eye contact would be achievable.

Because you would look at the person in the video, not the camera.

You want transparent cameras in the display.

This has existed for TV news cameras for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprompter#/media/File:Telep...

The trick is to put the camera behind a one-way mirror and project onto the other side.

You could find eyes in the video and alter them so that they look like user looks directly towards camera.

video: https://youtu.be/ypQpWIQ7lFQ

3d display details: http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DDisplay/

I had a lecturer who had seen IBM experiment using projections onto manikins placed around a board table shared with 'real' humans, and a mirrored arrangement on the other side of the 'electric' connection, old enough to be an entirely analogue affair, if anyone has an idea what he might have been referring to I would love to know!

Check out the other stuff from USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Paul Debevec on their YouTube channel [1]!

Ari Folman's cult-worthy movie "The Congress" [2] is bladerunneresquely based on Stanislaw Lem's psychedelic black humor fiction book "The Futurological Congress" [3].

At the apex of the movie, there's a riveting climactic scene where Robin Wright (playing a fictionalized version of herself) and Harvey Keitel use Paul Debevec's Light Stage [4] to capture her essence [5].

They show it in the trailer [6], but it's best to watch the whole film from start to finish without knowing what to expect. I really enjoyed it, especially the light stage scene, and not just because of the blinking lights -- the actors gave a spectacular performance.

The movie raises a lot of interesting issues, and I highly recommend it! [7] [8] [9] [10]

[1] USC Institute for Creative Technologies Graphics Lab: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOgm-72B_tibAM2I5j-mBiQ

[2] The Congress (movie): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

[3] The Futurological Congress (book): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress

[4] Light Stage 6: Relighting Human Locomotion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgUW1RN8QNM

[5] Light Stage 6 Anomaly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9gY3C2TeHE

[6] The Congress trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws

[7] ‘The Congress’ Trailer: Is This Live-Action/Animated Hybrid the Wildest Sci-Fi of 2013? http://www.slashfilm.com/the-congress-trailer-is-this-live-a...

[8] The Congress and the End of Actors: http://scienceandfilm.org/articles/2496/the-congress-and-the...

[9] Pixel Perfect: The scientist behind the digital cloning of actors. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/pixel-perfect-2

[10] Watch: The Future of Acting in the Technological Age: http://www.indiewire.com/article/watch-the-future-of-acting-...

funny how several papers from years ago end up on the HN top page

It's great! Historical material is always welcome on Hacker News.

One quality of HN that we should all treasure is its capacity to distribute historical knowledge. We'd like to do more in this area. A video was posted the other day of two authors of a classic paper discussing their work from 30 years ago. We don't see nearly enough of that kind of thing, and we've been thinking about how to sponsor more.

How so? Having never seen this before, I found it interesting. Doesn't matter to me when it's from. Lots of useful concepts were developed long ago and remain as useful today as they were back then. Sometimes they are even more useful today than they were originally, thanks to other work making the original work cheaper or easier to put to use now.