Unmirror
I'm someone who deeply enjoys looking at someone's face when I speak to them. I have a hard time gathering their thoughts and intuitions, and truly communicating with them, if I'm just hearing their voice. I desperately hate phone calls. As such, I'm a huge FaceTime user.
But one thing really annoys me about FaceTime, and that is that every time I use it I have to stare at my own face over and over again.
The idea
The idea for a pretty simple alternative came up when talking to a friend: what if we could find some other kind of indicator to show whether you're in frame or not? Because that's really the main purpose of your own face in a FaceTime. To verify that you don't look weird, and that you're in frame and the other person can see you.
The solution we came up with solves one of those problems but not all of them. I'm hoping that's enough that it provides value to someone.
It's called Unmirror, and you can try it there.
How it works
The solution is we use a cute animal, and this animal has different states. Each state corresponds to your orientation, or to your place on the screen:
- Sitting and relaxed. Everything's good and you don't have to take any action.
- Pacing. You're slightly out of screen, and you should use that as a cue to get back in.
- Fully greyed out. You're off the screen and your partner cannot see you.
Why animals
Two reasons:
- I think animals are cute.
- I think it could give some fun branding to the project. A user can pick a random animal and it will send them to a random room. You can see, "oh, what does the penguin room look like? What does the penguin look like when the penguin walks? What does the panda look like?"
A note on Autosprite
As a final note, I used Autosprite for the animals themselves, and I'd strongly suggest anyone try it out. The user experience was fantastic. They have a nice MCP that you can use to just describe what kind of animal you want, and that made the process of making animals very easy. I might make many more in the future.