A detailed test of Descript's eye contact feature shows it works well up close with good lighting, but gets buggy beyond five feet and struggles with glasses reflections. The presenter tested multiple distances, angles, and lighting setups to show when the AI-generated eye contact is reliable and when it falls apart.
Questions this video answers
July 2023
Arm's length (~1 arm), two arms (~5–6 ft), three arms (~≈?—described then ~10 ft at farthest) — explicitly mentioned ~5–6 ft and ~10 ft.
Apple's 1080p built-in webcam
I'm imagining the eye contact is probably pretty buggy at this point, but here I am. Today I'll be testing out Descript's eye contact feature. Okay, and here I am for the indoor test. This is the arm's length. This would be like sitting in front of your computer camera in front of your webcam. And let's see how the ICAM eye contact is looking straight at my camera or a little bit offset because I'm on my phone. The camera's over here looking at the screen. So how does the eye contact look? Now here's looking 45 degrees to the right, 45 degrees to the left. Here's looking down. Here's looking up. And now let me take a step back. So this is about five to six feet, about two arms length. And here I am looking off to the right. Here I am looking off to the left. Here I am looking up. Here I am looking down. Here I am. And one more step back. This is about three arms length. I'm imagining the eye contact is probably pretty buggy at this point. But here I am looking off to the right, looking off to the left, looking up and looking down. And just for fun, one more step back. This is probably 10ft and at this point I don't expect eye contact to be working very well at all. But here it is looking off to the right. Up, left and down. And one more. How is it? You probably can't even see my eyes. Okay. Okay. And here I am outside. This is an outdoor test. And how does it look? I got a hat on, so there's a little bit of shade. How about with it off? And then this is looking straight at the camera. 45 degrees off to the right. Up, left, down. Another step back. This is about two arms length, six feet, five to six feet, off to the right. Up, left, down. Another step back up. Oh, and let's do hats off. Up. Hats off. Right. Hats off. Left, hat's off. Left hat's off. Let's put the hat on. Up, down or right? Down, left. One more step back. Up, right, down, left. And then with hat off. Up, right, left. Well, that was bizarre. The last test I have for you is the most likely one that most people are probably going to use and that is being in your office in front of your computer, about an arm's length away while you're sitting down at your desk. And I'm using my computer's built in camera before. The two tests before were in 4K. This one is my Apple's 1080p built in webcam. There's no fancy lighting, it's just my office. So what I'm going to do is read a script and you're going to see how it looks when I'm reading with eye contact on versus when I'm reading with eye contact off. And I've intentionally put the script at the bottom of my screen so it's the most dramatic angle possible. And I'm going to kind of act out these, these situations so you can see how they look. Okay, so, tips and best practices for eye contact on video. For best results when using eye contact on a video, consider the following recommendations. Use eye contact on videos of a single person with their eyes clearly visible. Avoid excessive movement in the video. How does excessive movement look? Use studio lighting or other well balanced lighting setups instead of backlighting for optimal results. Minimize extreme angles between the face and the camera. A straight on angle generally provides the best outcome. If the person wears glasses, reflections on the lenses may affect eye contact. I don't have glasses, so I can't test that one. But how does it look? Again, I'm just in my office and I'm about one arm's length away from the camera looking down. And just for the sake of it, I'll look to the right, to the left, up, and it should look pretty good because this is what I normally do. What did we learn today? I think the big one is that being as close to your camera as possible really helps. If you're more than about five feet away, things start to get wonky. And it also helps to have. I didn't, I didn't go into this as much, but it helps to have good lighting. It helps to keep your head straight, looking straight at the camera. We talked about that. You know, you don't, you don't want to be looking off to the side, things like that. If you have glasses and you have a glare, try to minimize that glare as much as possible. And I will say this, this eye contact feature is less than a year old. I think descript introduced it in July of 2023 and they do say that it's in beta. So it's gotten a lot better since it's been released and it's going to continue to get better. And I think it's an amazing technology, especially for script reading. As you saw, when I'm just using my computer's webcam and I'm reading a script, it's great. There's no weird bugginess, no weird shapes to my eye. I think it's very, very passable, very usable, and it's a huge level up for people who are making videos and reading scripts. So thanks for watching. Hope this was useful. Leave comments with questions for future video ide.
