Telecommuters: tired of the constant embarrassment of showing up to video conferences wearing nothing but your underwear? Save the humiliation and all those pesky trips down to HR with Safe Meeting, the new system that uses the power of artificial intelligence to turn off your camera if you forget that casual Friday isn’t supposed to be that casual.
The following infomercial is brought to you by [Nick Bild], who says the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek but we sense a certain degree of “necessity is the mother of invention” here. It’s true that the sudden throng of remote-work newbies certainly increases the chance of videoconference mishaps and the resulting mortification, so whatever the impetus, Safe Meeting seems like a great idea. It uses a Pi cam connected to a Jetson Nano to capture images of you during videoconferences, which are conducted over another camera. The stream is classified by a convolutional neural net (CNN) that determines whether it can see your underwear. If it can, it makes a REST API call to the conferencing app to turn off the camera. The video below shows it in action, and that it douses the camera quickly enough to spare your modesty.
We shudder to think about how [Nick] developed an underwear-specific training set, but we applaud him for doing so and coming up with a neat application for machine learning. He’s been doing some fun work in this space lately, from monitoring where surfaces have been touched to a 6502-based gesture recognition system.
“sudden thong of remote-work newbies”
A little Freudian slip?
Drat you ninja fixed it.
I read this after the fix. My brain immediately saw thong anyway and I came down to comment only to discover….
I love the internet
Bwa ha ha ha ha 😂
We call them “Easter Eggs”
“tired of the constant embarrassment of showing up to video conferences wearing nothing but your underwear?”
If they were embarrassed by it, they can stop inviting me. I’ve said time and again, it’s just too much work to get my pants down off the roof to put them on.
It’s ivery ungrateful of them, given that I’ve made the effort to at least put /something/ on.
007 and Austin Powers join the video conference…
We recently had a consultant on a large development project Turn up to a video conference in bed.
One of my colleagues sometimes had nowhere else to work from than his bed. As long as your consultant was dressed and alert I wouldn’t hold his situation against him.
What does being dressed have anything to do with it?
Americans tend to be quite conservative about dress code at work…. But clothes do not make the man!
Being naked on video can be quite distracting to other members on the conference call. This can be detrimental to productivity.
Depends on who does it. I can assure you that my nudidity is a boom for productivity. You’ll never have seen a meeting end so quickly, so that people can get back to their work. 🤣
A few electrodes on the chair for presence of skin resistance would work too.
And high voltage generator :)
Maybe Sony can incorporate it as an option in the next Vaio.
They already have the ad for it :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HYPWRkbUlI
I was imagining something more like a deep fake that just sits there looking like a regular attentive person but follows your facial movements when you’re in view of the camera. So you could be wearing anything but all anyone would see is your fully dressed deep fake.
That is a pretty good idea… until (life.getPersonById(“me”).luck = change_to_bad) and the person identification on the jetson fails and doesn’t do the deep fake, then you would be pretty deep in it.