apple has a patent on something similar since 2006, http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...

recently improved upon it: http://appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/08/apple_files_patent...

Wonder why it never made it into a product.

Maybe they tried and current screen tech sucks for it?

Now that people are coming up with ways to put people's real facial expressions in VR, most video calls are probably going to be replaced with avatars generated from your face that use your facial expressions captured by the front-facing camera.

https://vimeo.com/156034648

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has a remarkable little snippet on this. I'll try to find it and respond back.

Edit: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527

Published in 1996

I think a floating head is a lot scarier than people not looking directly at me...

I was imagining something a bit more like http://store.steampowered.com/app/274920.

Or as in Ghost in the Shell. Hard to tell since it's a cartoon, but their video calls always seemed like they were supposed to be looking at a representation of the other person: https://youtu.be/bv3Xyt-0V6s?t=4m30s

The screen would be in the way?

Yes, but there must be some way to make the pixels translucent enough to work

The screen pixels or the camera pixels?

Or put 4 cameras on four sides of the screen and merge the video feed into screen center POV.

You can just virtually move the camera a bit if you are using something like Kinect V2 (with a tiny bit of stereo shadowing as a result).

Most phones have cameras behind their screens, good for taking close-ups of your index finger