Cameras / Photos / Video
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Background: Video chat is now relatively widespread. Frequently, people on a chat will be muted and/or have their video off. The Issue: The terminology for “a person is muted” is straightforward: “muted.” However, English currently lacks short terms for “I am muted” versus “I have the audio turned off for the remote speaker.” Additionally, there…
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Background: One popular animal-training technique is to give the animal (such as the killer whale in Fig. 1) a small reward immediately after it accomplishes a task. Proposal: Strangely, this approach—frequently-dispensed minor rewards—has rarely been attempted for humans. But with the increasing rate of remote work and the implementation of the dystopian surveillance state from…
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Background: Occasionally, a video meeting will be scheduled with a large number of participants. The Issue: Since the participants are usually only arranged based on who is actually present in a meeting, it can be hard to figure out exactly who has (and hasn’t) shown up, especially if the meeting has 10+ participants. For example,…
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Background: It is common for people to be glued to their cell phones for nearly 100% of their waking hours. This is especially true now that phone batteries last for hours even under heavy use and fast video-capable cellular data is available in most populated areas. The issue: It is commonly suggested that people should…
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Background: With the 2020 COVID plague, work-related video chats have become increasingly full of a large number of participants (Figure 1). The issue: Video chats have a problem that in-person office work does not: there is no convenient way for participants of an unreasonably-large video chat group to split off into subgroups. Instead, every discussion…
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Background: It seems that nearly every electronic device with a camera or microphone is now Internet-enabled and can wirelessly send video and audio to the world. The issue: Due to the preponderance of electronic hardware in a modern household, it can be difficult which (if any) device is spying on you at that exact moment…
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Background: When on a meeting with video chat, people generally like to look at least vaguely professional / presentable, even if they just rolled out of bed 5 minutes before the meeting. The issue: There are two main problems in video chat for people who want to project a corporate-approved professional image: The background should…
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Background: Laptop privacy screens (or “monitor filters”) reduce the viewing angle of a laptop screen in order to prevent evildoers from snooping on sensitive information on your laptop (Figure 1). The issue: Unfortunately, these privacy screens have a few downsides: They are inelegant to attach. Often, the attachment points block a small amount of screen…
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Background: In a hypothetical future where self-driving cars are increasingly common, they’ll have to do a really good job of automatically distinguishing between things that require sudden braking (e.g. a person in the roadway) and things that are OK to hit (e.g. a tumbling empty cardboard box). The issue: This is a hard problem. When…
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Background: “Lost cat” and “lost dog” signs are often placed up on telephone poles (Fig. 1), but it’s unlikely that a specific person who sees a lost pet will also have seen the sign (or even know that the pet is actually lost in the first place). Proposal: In order to add more people…
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