Meetings in 2020
Months ago, before shelter-in-place rules, working from home was an exception. Suddenly, the question for millions flipped to, “Who can’t work from home?” Like characters in Star Trek, we think nothing of our faces and voices being atomized and beamed across the planet to reintegrate on another screen.
In Zoom’s chest-up world of button-down shirts and pajama bottoms we become our faces and voices. It doesn’t matter if you’re 6’4” or 5’1”, or whether you’re wearing Prada heels or going barefoot. And whose image do we check the most in a video conference? Our own.
Digital personas are often not the same as the human facing the camera and mic. More and more, we will use algorithms to show ourselves in situationally, culturally, and self-appealing ways. This digitization and demonetization of appearance holds opportunities for deception, but it will also bring parity in the superficial to let our unique ideas and words shine.
Are Friends and Co-Workers Looking Better?
Have you ever wanted to just press a button and look better? Try Zoom’s Touch Up My Appearance. It blends-in pits and freckles and moles with, in geek speak, a low-pass filter. A recent Facebook patent application describes improved smoothing filters for live streaming. “The software would be able to make “perceived imperfections,” such as “skin blemishes, wrinkles, discolorations, [and] uneven surfaces less noticeable.” It’s digital foundation. Facebook’s Instagram provides a full-on Hollywood makeup kit.
Just apply one of thousands of filters like Eyelashes, Top Model Look, Perfect Face, or Gloss to edit your skin tone, eye size and color, jaw line, and lip fullness. For stills, like a profile picture, you can run the Facetune app on your phone and wipe away blemishes and pounds with the flick of a finger. Your digital self can have work done, for free. When overdone it brings the same gossip as physical plastic surgery. YouTube makeup star, Tati Westbrook, recently endured tabloid-like online accusations of using smoothing filters to perfect the results of her beauty tips. Westbrook began her career as an “image consultant.”
It’s AI, Again
The eminence gris of facial image enhancement is AI. Software scans scenes for faces then draws digital cutouts around them. Technically called face detection, localization, and segmentation, a chunk of code faithfully responds to every request: “Here’s a face, here’s another face, and oh, over there – that’s a face, too! Whaddaya want to do with them?” Once a face is retrieved, math can transform it into another dimension. Or add another dimension to it.
Augmenting Facial Reality
Use of augmented reality (AR) video filters has exploded during shelter-in-place as we seek expression and diversion in our screen-facing isolation. Instagram’s AR filters make Photoshopping look archaic. They carry names like GrainA4, Diva, Dream Face, Brain Beauty, Aphrodite, Holy Dragon, Freckles, and Beauty3000. Effects range from Yosemite Sam moustaches to swirling galaxies to Dali-ist warping to snakes streaming from eyes as tears. “StayHome” tattoos those words on your forehead. Popular filter creator, Omme Akhe, said in April, 2020’s Teen Vogue.com, “I think the beauty of the internet is having control over how you present yourself and your own image, looking futuristic and otherworldly is definitely part of that.”
Omme Akhe is definitely part of an exponential business model. Instagram enables a global pool of unpaid filter developers with its Spark AR tool kit. Two years after it opened Spark AR for general use there are 70,000 members in the developer group, Spark AR Community. The 387,000 followers of Instagram’s face.effects judge a non-stop filter pitch contest. To use a filter, users must “follow” its developer. The developer of a hit filter can quickly gain more than 100,000 followers. Developers vie to create the best new content. Followers pour in. More followers means more developers. More developers means more followers. Instagram grows and grows.
Looking Just Real Enough
Most surreal filters, such as stars swirling in eyes, will grab brief attention or cause a chuckle or a mental note. The most valuable filters will be those producing the best believable images of our selves. A main venue for tech that makes a face iconic is China’s bustling livestream market. Popular hosts can pull in seven figures annually. The major income source is gifts, electronic transfers, from their viewers. The hosts split their take with a production agency providing training and an equipped studio, and the broadcast platform. Tencent-backed Douyu is a major livestream site.
Visiting douyu.com is like arriving at a Chinese language gaming arcade. A colorful matrix of dozens of live video games lets fans watch and interact with noted gamers who strategize and frag their way to levelling-up. Scrolling down, just below the fold, is a very non-gaming array of Internet sweethearts. Each beckons to tens of thousands of subscribers with a de rigueur set of wang hong lian (internet celebrity face) features: fair skin, large eyes, high nose bridge, and slender, pointed chin.
Zooming in reveals the filters. Skin details turn plastic and white around the jaw. Bright redness on full lips flutters at the edges. Chin shadows flitter as algorithms decide among the most likely solutions. Online admirers decide the personas are good enough: the gifts flow in.
On July 25, 2019, the young, tempting Qiaobiluo Dianxia, “Her Majesty, Qiaobiluo,” was having a great day. Fans fired off gifts to reach her challenge goal of RMB 100,000 ($14,000 today). She promised to lift the on-screen ad covering her face once the goal was reached. This online showgirl had lured more than one hundred thousand regular followers with her wang hong lian and “sweet and healing voice.” Alas: a bug that lifted both the ad and her filtered persona swiftly felled Her Majesty’s empire. The real Qiaobiluo was seen: a plump 58-year-old woman with a jolly smile, neat, short black hair and unremarkable features. Admirers, notably those paying-up for a VIP room, hit the exit button in droves. Douyu banished Her Majesty from their platform’s realm.
Qiaobiluo created her dream career: getting rich by flirting with young men vying for her attention with gifts and private messages. The men, with hundreds of livestream stars to choose from who they will never meet or even see in person, were none the worse during the ruse. Her Majesty’s real crime was getting caught. Men will turn off their e-fund spigots if they suspect that they are flirting not with a teen-idol, but with her grandmother.
We will all face the day when we consider removing graduation dates and early jobs from our LinkedIn profile, working out more diligently, and hiding some gray hairs. And thinking hard about profile pictures, our visual emissary to opportunities: what implied age can we pull off? Care is needed. I recall meeting several years ago with the Chief Human Resources Officer of a Fortune 50 tech company whose profile picture seemed fifteen years dated. I wondered how else the corporate narrative had been shifted.
Real Foreign Language Skills?
Appearance aside, we all prefer conversing in our native language. In April 2019, global mega-star, David Beckham, seemed to talk in 9 languages in an “end malaria” PSA. Beckham’s piece had none of the usual dubbing discord. He formed words like a native speaker. Synthesia, a London-based startup, leveraged deepfake AI to move Beckham’s mouth. The PSA used voice-overs, but Microsoft’s Skype Translator has done real-time audio translation for four years.
We Will Decide How To Present Ourselves
The Harvard Business Review recently recommended how to maximize our video conference presence. Strong voice, wise framing, focus on the camera, no background distractions… There was nothing about tuning our ethnicity, or allowing a select few to see AR smoke belch from our ears to show anger.
In the future we may use a Video Persona Specialist to curate our facial and voice features for different occasions. Freemium software will offer custom sliders for key points in our expression, tone, and physical space. A global community of unpaid developers will vie for followers with persona filters named “Kingpin,” “Visionary,” and “The Expert.”
Your video persona will, likely within ten years, appear on multiple screens looking culturally appropriate and speaking several languages. If that’s what you want: it will be your choice.
Big Future Issues: Building Trust and Leveraging Equality
Trust is the central issue in working with people. How will we trust that the person on the other end of a video conference is who s/he looks and sounds like? And it is a two-way street: how do you ensure that others in an e-meeting believe that our video persona really represents us? Perhaps in-person meetings will be more desired than ever. In big situations, may need to see and hear and touch the real humans who we are trusting in our work, schools, and community.
Digital tech always happens faster than we think. Future forms of today’s Zoom, Instagram, SnapChat, and Meipai, will be globally accessible. Rural social workers will have the same options for meeting presence as C-level executives. How might the coming equality of presence be used to make better decisions? Opening forums to diverse and well-informed players always has benefits.
When online meeting presence is equalized, connection and persuasion will rely on ideas and nuance and listening and humor and pauses and all of the communication traits that are uniquely our own. Unless there’s an AI for those, too.
Featured Image sources: Andrew Neel, @andrewtneel; Wikimedia Commons; https://unsplash.com/s/photos/work-from-home