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'Front facing''Front facing'Posted Aug 1, 2012 9:32 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet
I found 'front-facing camera' to be ambiguous. When first reading it I assumed it means a camera facing forwards from the user's point of view when using the device. Later I realized it means a camera pointing backwards towards the user's face and what is behind.
Perhaps 'user-facing' or 'inward-facing' would be a better way to say it. And a camera which points in the same direction as the user's eyes could be called an 'outward-facing' camera.
P.S. the hobs on my electric oven were labelled front left, front right, back left, back right. Left and right were relative to the user, but front and back were the wrong way round relative to the user.
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'Front facing' Posted Aug 1, 2012 13:33 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
"Front" is meant to be absolute, not relative, I believe. Most people would not be confused when talking of the "front" of an oven, or a car, or a mobile phone, or a tablet. Meanwhile, "left" and "right" are also absolute in that they refer to your left and right in your habitual posture with respect to the device. Few people operate an oven with their back to it, but you operate a car while facing out of its front.
Think of pretty much every home device: your TV or stereo, when you face it, has its left speaker on your left, right speaker on your right, controls in the front -- ie the side facing you -- and wires in the back -- ie the side pointing the same way as your front.
Perhaps some (geeks, I expect) find it confusing, but most "normal" people wouldn't :)
'Front facing' Posted Aug 1, 2012 13:57 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
For the particular case of a camera it is confusing because the normal way to take photographs is to hold the camera in front of you, and the lens is on the front of the camera. I'd bet that if you asked ten people to draw a front-facing camera, or to hold a camera in a front-facing position, they would point it away from themselves and not backwards towards their own face. Cameras are not like televisions or stereos - they normally have the lens at the front and the controls at the back.
'Front facing' Posted Aug 8, 2012 0:54 UTC (Wed) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
People agree on where the front of a car is, but I've found that people disagree on what "in front of that car" means when the car's headlights face away from them. (A similar but perhaps slightly different sort of ambiguity is that I've found that people disagree as to where the bottom of a cup is that's held upside-down.) Non-geeks in each case, FWIW.
People would usually agree that the side of a mobile phone with the display is the front, and that the side of a camera with the display is the back, so I can well imagine that there'd be confusion as to which side is the front when a mobile phone is being used as a camera.
If "some (geeks, I expect) find it confusing", then that's already reason enough to try to find a better way of describing a tablet's camera direction than "front/rear-facing". [As for ‘"normal", non-geeky people’, doesn't that exclude LWN readers almost by definition?]
Other than "inward/outward-facing" or "user/(scene?)-facing", some possibilities might be "self-facing" or "display-side".
'Front facing' Posted Aug 7, 2012 21:58 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
FWIW, this sense of "front-facing" and "back-facing" is standard in the smartphone/tablet world. It makes sense to me, since the screen is on the "front" of the device, the same place as the "front-facing" camera.
'Front facing' Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:35 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
But surely a "front facing" camera should "face" the "front", not "be on" the "front". A "front facing" camera that is "screen side" will face my front, so maybe what works. but a "Back-facing" camera doesn't face anyone's back ... unless I'm stuck in a queue. "Case side" works for me.
But that wouldn't be the only part of our delightful language which is back-to-front (Q: does English encourage you do view the future as in front of you, or behind you?)
'backwards into the future' Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:57 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] But there is a storm blowing from Paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called Progress- Laurie Anderson "The Dream Before"
'Front facing' Posted Aug 8, 2012 9:26 UTC (Wed) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] But that wouldn't be the only part of our delightful language which is back-to-front (Q: does English encourage you do view the future as in front of you, or behind you?)Depends, are you backward or forward-looking? ;)
'Front facing' Posted Aug 8, 2012 9:29 UTC (Wed) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] When a meeting is "moved back" it usually means moved to a later date. When a meeting is "moved forward" it could go either way.
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