The new Microsoft Surface Pro X has a feature designed specifically for those working from home or remotely.
The necessity to work remotely has been at an all-time high recently with the ongoing pandemic keeping most folks confined to their four walls. Luckily working from home has never been easier with technology advancing at an increasing rate.
This is where Microsoft comes in as they have developed a new feature for the Surface Pro X called Eye Contact.
Microsoft’s AI-powered Eye Contact feature for the Surface Pro X will now be rolling out soon. The feature relies on the “artificial intelligence capabilities of the Microsoft SQ1 processor” to adjust to where your eyes are looking in a video chat or call to make sure that it appears as if you are always making eye contact with the camera.
When the feature is enabled the eye contact correction will automatically apply itself to apps using the front camera such as Zoom, Skype, or Google Meet. The one limitation is that it will only work when the Surface Pro X is in Landscape mode. It does also use a significant amount of battery life, so best to have your power cable plugged in when using the feature.
Eye Contact has been in testing for about a month and is available as part of the Surface Pro X’s 14 of August update. To get this update though you will need to be running the Windows 10 May 2019 Update, version 1903, or greater. The feature won’t be available on regular x86 computers though as that kind of processing draws too much power to be practical on a regular machine. The new firmware for the Surface Pro X also ushers in various security and stability updates and fixes a crash with the Camera app.
This feature will come in handy now with the increase in video calls happening daily around the world and will make for a more comfortable experience as it will seem that the person you are chatting with is actually looking at you.
Microsoft’s Surface Book 2 has also received a firmware update to improve Windows Hello login and to apply some stability fixes, as well as fixing the frustrating issue where the processor will mistakenly throttle down to 400MHz.