I am using AI to discreetly browse reddit while working
Sometimes I want to browse reddit and watch youtube videos at work but I don't like everyone walking by to see whats on my screen.
So I made a chrome extension that has a hidden webcam checking for my eyes and whether they are looking at the screen. If I look away, it pauses and mutes whatever is in the tab and covers it with an excel file until I look back again.
First of all, the live demo (and all source code): simpleai.darefail.comhttps:///">simpleai.darefail.com
Once you upload it, you activate by being on any webpage and right-clicking "Priva-see" (name to be changed)
The way it works is with an AI "Gaze" model. It looks at your face and estimates the pitch and yaw of your eyes.
Pitch and Yaw mean which way you are looking. Left, Right, Up, Down. If these values are 0, then I think it is safe to assume you are looking directly at the camera so the red dot will stay in the center.
On a first try, it's hard to use. I'm used to seeing myself in the mirror and if I try to look at my hand I want the dot to follow so I flipped the webcam so it is a mirror.
The dot is still pretty random, not in the center of the screen. It turns out it's being displayed in the corner. I never centered the whole thing or took into account where my eyes are. Fortunately, the formula estimates the coordinates of my eyes too. I just take left eye and set the dot there initially because "close enough".
Now it seems to move around but it doesn't move very much. I couldn't say try to surf the internet with this very well. So I turn up what I call the sensistivity. It's just multiplying the distance from the center by this number. I found 25 works well.
Now that it's extremely sensitive, the dot is all over the place. I made a "Reduce Jitter:" value to smooth it out. It looks at the last frame and only moves it a fraction of a % towards where it currently thinks I am looking. I found out this is what's called a low pass filter.
When it doesn't detect the position of my eyes, I cover the whole thing in a fake excel image. I also played with blurring the whole screen which is funny but defintely draws more attention.
Some fun future use cases I am playing with today. If you remove the line of code where I clear the canvas, you can start drawing with your eyes.
I attempted to do a coloring just with my eyes. I will need some work.
I also realize that blinking is a bit like a mouse click. I have started to play with surfing the internet just with my eyes but it is still a bit too clunky to use and some websites like github block this behavior even when it coems from a Chrome Extension. For good reason of course, imagine if an extension started clicking around for you automatically. I am experimenting with this in public still.
