Front-facing camera in AR - incubation

[bialpio]

Hey Immersive Web,

We’re getting some interest internally in enabling the use of a front-facing camera for AR sessions, so my question to the group is: would this be something that others would like to collaborate on? There’s already an issue asking for such a knob (see immersive-web/webxr-ar-module#64, although selecting more details apart from user- vs environment-facing camera would be out of scope). What does the group think about incubating something like this?

Also paging in @nbutko and @tangobravo as I vaguely recall you were mentioning user-facing camera scenarios?

If there’s interest, then it’d also be nice to figure out the best way to move forward with this - my current line of thinking is that this could be enabled as an additional feature (mostly due to how enabling a front-facing camera may cause other features to become unavailable), which would potentially make it a very simple extension to the API surface & may not warrant a dedicated repository (but then would we need Level 2 of whichever spec we add it to?).

-Piotr

[AdaRoseCannon]

Maybe put the issue in the proposals repo and start having discussions there then a home can be found where it seems to fit best

[bialpio]

SG, let me file a new issue to fit the template.

[nbutko]

Should we add this to the agenda for the next biweekly meeting?

[bialpio]

Let's!

/agenda

[tangobravo]

Would world tracking still be a requirement in front-facing camera usage? Would face-tracking be a requirement?

On mobile traditionally (ie ARCore of a few years ago, I haven't looked recently) it was a straight choice - world tracking on the rear camera or face tracking on the front-facing camera.

I think newer iOS devices that support multi-camera sessions can continue world tracking on the rear camera whilst providing a front-facing feed with face tracking.

I guess I'm not really seeing the use-case for front-facing camera in a WebXR context outside of face-tracking, and face tracking doesn't seem to be part of this proposal.

We do have plenty of front-facing experiences using face tracking and segmentation but world tracking isn't commonly a feature of them. We could do that with raw-camera-access and use WebXR for the front-facing feed, but if world tracking is lost in that scenario, then why not just use getUserMedia?

Sorry I probably can't make the call this week.

[Yonet]

@bialpio I will create the incubation repo and add you as the contact person. There is a template for repo, it will be easier to create it now, instead of you creating your own. We need to vote on the other contact person on the next meeting.

[Yonet]

@bialpio repo is created here: https://github.com/immersive-web/front-facing-camera. I'm closing this issue but keeping the proposal one.