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'Front facing''Front facing'Posted Aug 1, 2012 13:33 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)In reply to: 'Front facing' by epa Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet
"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 :)
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'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".
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