If you’ve ever tried to glance at your computer screen and read something from across the room, you know it’s a pretty futile effort, no matter how hard you squint. This demo website has a solution: dynamically changing font size based on your distance from the screen. The catch? It wants to watch you read.
Realtime Responsive Typography, a project by Marko Dugonjić, is just an experiment, but it’s an interesting one. By using your webcam — after receiving your explicit permission to do so, of course — the page will track your face and adjust the font to an optimal size based on how far away your are. Of course, it’s a little buggy in its current, prototype form. You’ll notice the font size bounces around a lot. And popular desk activities like slouching and drinking coffee only make the problem worse.
While you might not have much use for such a feature on your laptop, it could have some cool applications for larger, farther away displays, like scaling the UI on your TV, or maybe jacking up the size of subtitles and closed captions. But easy to read text is a pretty minor convenience at the expense of taking the electrical tape off your webcam (No? Just me?) and being watched all the time. You can check it out for yourself over at Dugonjić’s demo page. I mean, hey, it’s a good excuse to scoot around in your office chair, and that’s worth it on its own, right? [via Hacker News]