In his newsletter, David Perell asked for “the Sonos for home audio-video setups—without the wires and complexity—with the ease and quality of an iPhone camera,” and offered to help/invest in such a company.

  1. His assumptions are dangerously wrong.
  2. I built a prototype.

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The two biggest problems with virtual conversation, EQUALLY catastrophic to human communication, are Poor Audio Quality and Lack of Eye Contact. Poor Camera Quality and Bad Lighting, while problematic, barely affect communication, so they aren’t problems unless you’re recording.

Audio is a solved problem (more on that later), but any home a/v product that doesn’t FIRST address Lack of Eye Contact is useless. You may as well buy a garbage Logitech webcam.

But there’s good news: Eye Contact is also a solved problem. All you need is a teleprompter.

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While Apple tries to solve the Lack of Eye Contact problem with (creepy) software that shifts pixels to move your eyeline, teleprompters already solve this 100% perfectly. Errol Morris, the best talking-head documentary filmmaker ever, used them to build his famous Interrotron.

Okay, so every desk needs a teleprompter. Obviously. But we have a bigness problem: Teleprompters are giant and unwieldy with sharp edges and too many parts and people don’t understand them. There are approximately 12 people in the world who are going to put them on their desks.

What we need first is a really compact teleprompter. What, you say? That already exists? No it doesn’t. Teleprompters built for phones are useless, because a) phones can’t be second monitors for computers, and b) who wants to set up their phone on a thing for every video call?

But iPad prompters do exist and iPads can be used as second monitors… This is true! I spoke with Adam Lisagor and Charles Forman about this in the summer, but at the time you couldn’t reverse the image (necessary because mirrors), even with hacky utilities like SwitchResX.

Of course, Adam Lisagor knows all the nerds, so he was able to get LunaDisplay to make an AstroPad feature for flipping/reversing the iPad-as-a-second-monitor, which is awesome, but… Non-nerds are still never going to do this. Too many components/wires/questions.

The actual solution to desktop audio/video must have:

  1. A small footprint (less that 6 to 8 inches), or even better, sit on top of an existing monitor or iMac.
  2. A dedicated teleprompter screen.
  3. A dedicated camera (16mm sensor or better) with mic input.
  4. A single cable.

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I built this prototype because I need it for me and colleagues. It solves everything, but your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to:

  1. Get this mess into one beautiful 6-inch box
  2. Get image/audio to and power/monitor from the computer on one USB-C
  3. Make it less than $1,000

I’ll follow up with a list of parts and a video I shot of building this thing. For the record: I’m not saying I used the best parts for this prototype. I just used what was lying around my office and some extra bits I got from Amazon. A hacksaw was involved. You can do better.

I didn’t address audio, so here’s the entire secret to unlock all the magic of good audio in your life forever:

  1. Put (pretty much any) microphone—
  2. —close to your mouth and—
  3. —set the level so it sounds good.
  4. If you can’t do 3., Google “adjust audio levels for “

I also didn’t address lighting. We know this product will have an integrated ringlight but the cool kids will not use it (because it is uncool). There’s no one lighting secret. It’s a nuanced thing. But you can’t go wrong with a large, soft light (window or softbox) 45° off axis.

I also never really covered the camera. That’s because as long as it has a sensor 16mm or larger, it’s not that important. In my opinion, the optimal camera would have a Super-16 sensor (like the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera I’m using) with a fixed, wide open 16mm lens.

I have little desire to build a company making a baby teleprompter/camera combo (which you could call the Eyeliner™️ if you wanted to). If you’re looking for an idea that needs to exist, I hope this thread correcting for David Perell’s forgivable but grievous errors is helpful.

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There are already companies trying to build solutions in the home audio/video space.

If there’s no integrated teleprompter, they blew it.

If the camera sensor is less than 16mm, they blew it (less so, but they still blew it). And this includes any magic inside-the-screen tech.

Here’s what I actually look like through the prototype (totally dark, quick in OBS, no color, not well-lit, etc.). The things to notice are a) you don’t need a big sensor to have nice lensing (this one is Super-16mm), and b) eye contact is everything, even in a poorly-lit room.

Here’s a closer look at the prototype minilittlebaby teleprompter. I’m probably not going to post a whole video because it won’t even be helpful because you’ll need to come up with your own versions of some of the parts anyway (or just fashion your own out of wood or something)