It uses your face to make the little avatar to show to people as you move around the map! (as well as to animate the little emoji that follows you around!) I honestly don't know if a show-your-face policy is the best to prevent people being mean to each other online - I'd love to hear your thoughts! You can read my code though, nothing gets saved anywhere and the video calling functionality is all peer-to-peer!

i think show-your-face is a reasonable burden that will help improve conversation quality

If you don't want to show your face, you can use the parameters "--use-fake-device-for-media-stream --use-file-for-fake-video-capture=/path/to/y4m_or_mjpeg" on Chromium. You can get y4ms from xiph.org[1].

[1]: https://media.xiph.org/video/derf/

What’s creepy? The smiley face or that it requires a face? requiring a face is a good call

The fact that if I hadn't used a physical barrier then my face would have been immediately fed into a detection algorithm without any explanation or warning.

I get that it's just a tech demo but a small disclaimer about what will be done with the data before requesting the permission would go a long way.

The facial detection all runs locally in your browser using tensorflow.js and it's crazy that we live in a time that's even possible :D

But I do appreciate the feedback and will be sure to add a disclaimer and make it clear what's going on!

Yeah it doesn't need to be long (short is actually better as more chance of people reading it through)

1. The app requests permission to view your camera

2. Your video stream is displayed and a local js script will run facial recognition (not against a database, just a binary "is this a face") and only then will it allow you to join the chat.

3. When you join the chat, your video and audio will be transmitted but will not be stored.

some people likely won't even read it and just click anyway, but for the curious and/or paranoid it will definitely be reassuring.

thanks for sharing your work.

The prompt is to allow use of your camera. Do you expect it to make you waffles?

What exactly do you think will happen other than _using your camera_?

Maybe, but it makes it impossible for me to test it at the moment as my webcam doesn't capture enough light to get the face detection working apparently.

Firefox asked me for permission to use my video camera, so unless that didn't happen for you not sure why you would be surprised that its using your camera feed.