Facial recognition is pretty common on your phones, and eye-tracking is even starting to show up in some laptops. So naturally, someone was going to start scanning your face … for a gaming monitor?
As something to stand out in the ultrawide crowd, MSI’s MPG341CQR screen has a bit of an odd feature: 2D facial recognition. It doesn’t do anything in game, like Tobii eye-tracking might, but it does mean that you can assign monitor profiles based on your face.
I can’t imagine how often someone who buys a 34-inch ultrawide gaming monitor for their PC would be sharing that space. But if you’ve got multiple people who use the same PC, the MPG341CQR (which seriously needs a new name) will detect that there’s a new person, and load up their preferred brightness, contrast, monitor temperature, whether they prefer a particular preset, and so on.
The monitor was first announced at CES this year, but Computex was the first chance for most in the enthusiast crowd to get hands on. The camera, located in the bottom bezel of the monitor, also acts as a sensor to detect lighting in the room.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Windows Hello, which would be really cool. Sitting down at your monitor and unlocking it with your face can be handy in laptops, and it’d be great for your PC. Based on my experience with phones though, you’d want it to be a 3D scan instead of 2D — 2D scanning barely works in the dark, and is pretty inconsistent generally. So that might be something for the next generation of ultrawide monitors.
Beyond that, it’s a pretty weird feature to have. But there’s only so many things you can do with a gaming monitor, considering all the gaming brands are getting their monitor panels from the same place. So weird is good, even if I’m not sure how useful it’d be.
The author travelled to Computex as a guest of ASUS and Intel.
Leave a Reply