21–30 of 85 posts
For all of the problems with VR/spatial meetings, boredom is not one, and Hubs makes for a pretty good Powerpoint with fidget spinners.
It requires the office buy into gaming/avatar culture (which I realize is a tall order) but it works for us.
As someone who has worked with remote teams for years and has spent many, many hours in Zooms and the like, my advice is to get used to it because it's great. I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking. What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in…
I think with some image computation it should be possible to give a much better video conferencing experience. Add better backgrounds and maybe have several cameras and compute a more 3D image vs the weird angles we see now.
What do people think of "equalizing" your voice for these online meetings? Reducing the higher frequencies in favor of lower ones. Any tools on linux that can do this?
It only requires pulseaudio (almost all distro's already use it) and is available in most package repositories and as a flatpak.
As someone who has worked with remote teams for years and has spent many, many hours in Zooms and the like, my advice is to get used to it because it's great. I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking. What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in…
There's a huge difference! You can move around in-person without making sure you're "in frame", subtle body language isn't lost to the shitty framerates and compression of most webcams, speech doesn't get messed up from packet loss or shoddy echo cancellation code, and you are in a shared environment which makes it easier to communicate without having to STARE at the other person/camera the entire time you're talking to them.
The solution to Zoom fatigue is to eliminate meetings where the purpose is to share basic facts & information. Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems.
>The solution to Zoom fatigue is to eliminate meetings where the purpose is to share basic facts & information. Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems. Just an fyi to avoid derailing the topic... The "fatigue" the author is talking about is not about frequency of useless and redundant meetings. Her usage of "fatigue" is specifically talking about bad sound quality and s…
I hope that if video conferencing stays more popular we will see a lot of progress there. Cell phone cameras have shown what can be achieved with enough computation so I hope the same can be done for video conferencing. The current solutions are still very primitive as far as sound and image quality goes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The solution to Zoom fatigue is to eliminate meetings where the purpose is to share basic facts & information. Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems. Just an fyi to avoid derailing the topic... The "fatigue" the author is talking about is not about frequency of useless and redundant meetings. Her usage of "fatigue" is specifically talking about bad sound quality and s…
Thank you! Props for polite correction on someone straw-manning the OP. Otherwise I likely wouldn't have looked into this one. I've definitely noticed mental fatigue from the changed aural environment in my house. I normally work from home, but now that my wife is also WFH, I've realized that hearing her on zoom at the same time as I'm in a meeting (or trying to concentrate) just melts my brain. Can't actually commen…
> Zoom fatigue is real. What's the evidence for this? I believe there is a psychological effect that people report more malaise when you ask them about it. Back when I first studied psychology I self-diagnosed myself with like 5 different mental defects. Confirmation bias and hypochondriasis?
My team is spread throughout the US and for a few years now my professional life was wall to wall Google Hangouts/Meet. It's been largely business as usual for us.
I wouldn't say there aren't other factors. General anxiety about ones health and paycheck, parents are now largely unpaid teachers, 24/7 news coverage of generally bad news.
It probably all adds up and we just blame it on technology. 5g towers, video games and now Zoom.
Based on an earlier discussion here on HN about Zoom burnout and latency I recorded a cast episode about that very subject: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/3-is-latency-killing-o...
Watching hoards of people hop on webcams to transmit choppy video information about their face and home seems like wasted bandwidth to me.
Edit: addendum, get a headset, transmitting voice clearly with some decent noise cancellation is really important. I buy the cheap logitech h390, like 25 bucks each.
As someone who has worked with remote teams for years and has spent many, many hours in Zooms and the like, my advice is to get used to it because it's great. I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking. What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in…
You can make eye contact.