I don't see how the eye correction is any less of a "modification of content and meaning" than the use of an offset camera angle which it's correcting for. Just because the offset angle is currently a technical necessity and an "analogue" distortion, doesn't make it any less of a manipulation.

> doesn't make it any less of a manipulation.

I think we've got a fundamental disagreement here. We'll just have to agree to disagree :-)

In an effort to be more agreeable, I really do understand where you're coming from. I'm just openly wondering if there is a technology bias at play making stuff we're already accustomed to and which feels normal to us (e.g. cameras with rectilinear lenses capturing images from arbitrary angles) feel less manipulative than stuff which is new and technically sophisticated.

what up SJ. I have to comment on you again my friend. Why are you so passionate about this eyeball re-drawing technology? Do you video call your family and friends all the time because you live far away?

Reading these conversations i'm going a bit crazy as you try to rationalize why this eyeball redrawing business is a good and necessary tech. I think it's complete trash. Is this the tech that makes apple worth billions of dollars?

Not trying to stir shit up with you. just generally curious as I have an extremely opposite viewpoint. I am 28, prime millenial love to use apps and phone age. I am a huge nerd and geek (clearly as we are commenting on HN lol). I have literally never face-timed anyone except when other people are doing it and I am nearby.

I first used a Macintosh 512k when I was around 5 years old. I had my own PC by the time I was 18 (a dual celeron 300A at one point) and I now spend my days doing programming and web development.

I’m now 38 and I’ve seen my two year old son’s face light up when he sees his mum through the phone screen.

My wife’s parents are on the other side of the planet and their intercontinental video chats connect them to our family.

I love science, math, philosophy and photography. I should care about pixel perfect truth. But to me the value of FaceTime is entirely emotional. I say that when my wife looks into my eyes, I want to see her eyes looking at mine. The fact that this isn’t how it works now is because of optical distortion. While this isn’t a true holistic fix for the underlying distortion—that would be amazing—it looks like a neat solution.

I’ve not seen it live and I’ll reserve final judgment till then. If it’s even slightly noticeable I’ll absolutely hate it. But if I can see no sign of trickery when staring into my wife’s eyes, it might just make the world a happier place, even if only a tiny bit.

Here's another anecdote to help satiate your curiosity: I'm a 27 year old software developer, lifelong nerd and all around hacker, and I love FaceTime to the point where it's inclusion in the iPhone is a defining feature of my experience with the product.

After relocating for college and again for work, I have family across four timezones and friends even farther abroad. In my experience, nothing short of a flight bridges that distance better than video calling. I can see my mother's eyes light up when we haven't spoken in a while, my younger brother can hold up his latest pair of sneakers to the camera while he geeks out about them, and watching my best friend's new puppy bounce around his apartment is much more interesting than hearing it bark in the background.

I'll probably make a FaceTime call 3-4 times a week, which from observation and casual conversation appears to be a similar frequency to the rest of my friend group (mostly coastal millennials, largely Bay Area + NYC, ages 24-31).

With regards to the eye repositioning I agree with the grandparent poster. All captured images are reproductions of reality, and if I were to place this one on a spectrum between corrective glass elements for lens distortion and cat-person filters I would say it's much closer to the former. In my opinion the correction captures the intent of the user, and I feel that's truthful enough.

Fair enough, I disagree with your premise but I respect your viewpoint nonetheless. I do feel that we should be vigilant at monitoring which such usages we are comfortable with - while I might be comfortable with this being used for something innocuous like eye offset correction, I would oppose its use for something more nefarious.

It's not modifying content and meaning, it's preserving content and meaning. When you're on FaceTime, the image you're seeing is not captured from where your eyes are presented on the screen, it's captured from somewhere above. This is a technical defect and it means that when the person you're talking with looks you in the eye, you don't see that. This is correcting that flaw and makes it so when the person you're talking with looks you in the eye on their end, you see that on your end too.

This is more akin to doing a white balance adjustment, such that you see what the scene is expected to look like rather than the raw data captured by the camera, it's just correcting for camera location instead of exposure.

Another way to think about it is this is a software fix for a hardware limitation. In an ideal world we'd fix the hardware limitation, remove the software fix, and your experience would be unchanged (or actually, even better, because of the lack of distortion on stuff crossing your eyes).