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ZTE announces the world's first phone with a behind-the-screen camera:
ZTE has officially announced the world's first commercial phone with a behind-the-screen camera: the ZTE Axon 20 5G. Shrinking phone bezels have made locating the front camera a major design point of phones for the past few years. We've seen big camera notches, small camera notches, round camera cutouts, and pop-up cameras. Rather than any of those compromises, the under-display camera lets you just put the camera under the display, and by peering through the pixels, you can still take a picture. It's the holy grail of front-camera design.
As we've seen in explainers from Xiaomi, these under-display cameras work by thinning out the pixels above the display, either by reducing the number of pixels or by making the pixels smaller, which allows more light to reach the camera. In the area above the camera, manufacturers will have to strike a balance between a denser display with lower-quality camera results or better camera output in exchange for an uglier above-the-camera display.
Also at CNX Software.
See also: Xiaomi's Third Generation Under-Display Camera Tech is Everything I Want
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday September 04 2020, @08:00AM (4 children)
I agree: this might be boon for videoconferencing.
On the other hand, it might just slip into uncanny valley. Humans are very good at noticing slight oddities, and if the camera is in roughly the right place, but not exactly the right place it could well be noticeable at a subliminal level. People move around, and heads appear in different positions on screens, so the camera (or cameras) may not correspond exactly with the potion of the pupil(s) of the displayed image, so the gaze direction of the person viewing the screen will be slightly off. Humans are very sensitive to gaze direction (there is a hypothesis (the co-operative eye hypothesis [wikipedia.org]) that our sclera (white bit around the iris) are visible to enhance the display of gaze direction) so use of this technology might just make a video-conference feel weird, rather than natural.
I've wondered if a better approach would be to use two off-axis cameras at the side of the screen and synthesize an image so the gaze direction would be spot-on. Hard to do in real time.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 04 2020, @08:22AM
In fact putting it at a golden ratio instead of the center on the vertical axis might help further.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @02:57PM (2 children)
All you need to do to correct this problem is move the camera (+screen) slightly further away. The television industry has been doing this for the better part of a century since the invention of the teleprompter, which is always located offset from the camera.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday September 06 2020, @01:53PM
Yeah, they also tend to place it so that the other eye is straight to the camera when the dominant eye is on the prompter
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(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday September 06 2020, @04:47PM
The teleprompters I am familiar with have a semi-transparent sheet of glass at a 45 degree angle to the line of sight between the camera and the person reading it, onto which the text is projected, so the camera 'looks through' the sheet of glass. The trouble is, it is still completely obvious that the person is looking at the text and not the camera, as the gaze is focussed on the text, not the camera, and the movement of the eyes reading the text is a dead giveaway.
Its a bit like jpeg and mpeg artifacts - once you know what you are looking for, you see it all the time.
Good performers know to look/focus behind the camera when performing to camera, so the end result is perceived as natural by the viewer. People who look at the camera have their focus on the plane of the image collector, which is reproduced on the image, so people look as if they are focussing at the plane of the (TV) screen in front of you - in other words, somewhat in front of you, rather than at you. It's a subtle point, but once you know what you are looking for, horribly obvious.