Word: blinks
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...eyes on something bigger: a lovely five-bedroom, riverfront suburban house, owned but never occupied by a coal magnate from Shanxi province. "How much does he want for it?" he asked a local real estate agent in late February. When told the answer was $735,000, Yang didn't blink. "I'd like to make an offer." (Read "Bubble Trouble: Why Real Estate Is China's Biggest Headache...
...fazed by sunlight. Like the vamps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they appear human until they show their true form: fangs, gross veiny blue skin and all-black eyes. Grahame-Smith describes a vampire getting his game face on: "His eyes turned black in the space of a single blink, as if the inkwells in his pupils had suddenly shattered - the spill contained behind glass." (See why zombies are the new vampires...
...Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant who goes by the Web handle "jozjozjoz," thought it was funny that the camera had difficulties figuring out when her family had their eyes open. So she posted a photo of the blink warning on her blog under the title, "Racist Camera! No, I did not blink... I'm just Asian!" The post was picked up by Gizmodo and Boing Boing, and prompted at least one commenter to note, "You would think that Nikon, being a Japanese company, would have designed this with Asian eyes in mind." (See the top 10 gadgets...
...blink problem Wang complained about has less to do with lighting than the plain fact that her Nikon was incapable of distinguishing her narrow eye from a half-closed one. An eye might only be a few pixels wide, and a camera that's downsampling the images can't see the necessary level of detail. So a trade-off has to be made: either the blink warning would have a tendency to miss half blinks or a tendency to trigger for narrow eyes. Nikon did not respond to questions from TIME as to how the blink detection was designed...
...unreliable. Today, it's up to 99% accurate. With the flurry of consumer complaints out there, most of the companies seem to be responding. HP has offered instructions on how to adjust its webcam's sensitivity to backlighting. Nikon says it's working to improve the accuracy of the blink-warning function on its Coolpix cameras. (Sony wouldn't comment on the performance of its Cyber-shot cameras and said only that it's "not possible to track the face accurately all the time.") Perhaps in a few years' time, the only faces cameras won't be able to pick...