Adventures By Design

[caption id="attachment_1026" align="aligncenter" width="397" caption="Star Trek viewscreen (notice the eye-to-eye contact? How do they do that?)"][/caption]

Talking to my mother on Skype is wonderful for how is diminishes the distance between us. I look forward to the time when Skype has become such a normalized part of our communication, that we don’t have to go through that “is it on?” stage, followed by the “wow! this is so cool” stage, and instead we can just fire up Skype and get on with the conversation. I can imagine a time when just like Captain Kirk, mom and I can chat with the same natural familiarity of sitting in the same room (did Kirk ever simply chat? Conversed? Yes. Discussed? Often. But chat… I don’t think so.).

[caption id="attachment_1027" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Ric looking at mom's Skype picture."][/caption]

We’ll get there, but there’s a limitation with webcams that annoys me: my mom and I cannot see eye-to-eye. Ha, ha. No really, we cannot simultaneously look into each other’s eyes. If my mom is looking at the Skype image of me, the picture I see of her is with her eyes downcast. And similarly, if I am looking at her on the screen, the image of me has my eyes looking down too. The reason for this is because the web camera is mounted above our monitors, but the image we see of our dear loved ones is several inches below that. This is something like parallax error in a If I want my mom to see me looking directly at her, I have to stare at the webcam on the top of my monitor. From her point of view, I will now be looking her in the eye, however, I won’t be able to see her image, except in my peripheral vision. The subtle yet annoying result is that I feel my mom and I aren’t connecting as naturally as we would face-to-face. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who will only focus on your chin.

[caption id="attachment_1028" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Ric looking at camera."][/caption]

So, this problem has been bouncing around in my head for a week or so and I think I have a solution: prosthetic eye webcams. Well, ok, maybe that won’t work for everyone (unless you are willing to give up an eye). No, my solution is more low tech.

Using my mom and me as an example, if I could position my webcam in the same location as my mom’s eyes, then it would look natural to her when I looked at her face as she was speaking. If I position my monitor so it is facing away from me, then place a signal mirror in front of it, when I look in the mirror, I see the monitor screen. A signal mirror has a hole in it; place a webcam in this hole and aim it at myself. Now start up Skype, call my mom, and adjust the camera so it is roughly between her eyes. That’s it. When mom looks at her screen, she’ll see me looking at her eyes. Of course, mom would have to do the same set up with her computer, so it would look natural for me too.

So, have I done it yet? Nope, not yet. But I think it would work.

Note: In searching for images for this post, I discovered that several businesses already identified and addressed this problem (here and here). Like many of my (ahem) brilliant ideas (such as solar panel shingles), other people have had the same, and usually better, ideas. So, there goes my career as in inventor. But, at least I got the mental challenge of figuring it out, and really, that’s the best part.

Late Saturday evening I started fasting.  On Sunday morning we took the train to Shanghai and arrived at the hospital where we immediately checked into our room.  At first I wasn’t sure if this was really our room, or just a holding area.  The room was rather nice: leather couch, coffee table, private bathroom with towels, toothbrushes, and soap.  It’s nicer than a lot of hotels we’ve stayed in.

As some of you know I have been entertaining an unexpected and unwanted guest in my left nostril. Nicknamed Norm, short for Abnorm, I noticed a small lump in my nose several weeks ago. At first I thought it was just a scratch and would go away on its own. But after a few days, it continued to grow and worse yet, it would spontaneously bleed. This was right at the start of our trip to Egypt, which was not an ideal location to hunt for a reputable international clinic (to be fair, we never actually looked, since in our experience the Egyptian approach to honesty and integrity do not inspire any confidence).