51–60 of 99 posts
> In-person encounters are crucial for establishing trust and building successful teams, according to research Sources of many counterexamples: EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Rift. In all of these games numerous groups of people who have never interacted with each other in person have formed long term successful trusting teams. EverQuest in particular in its first several years r…
My bet is a big part of the issue is webcams not being embedded in the screens. It's literally impossible to have eye contact because either you are looking at the webcam and not seeing other people, or you are looking at your screen. Many animals are very good at recognizing direct vs indirect eye contact and so I would assume the same is true for humans too.
"The most important element of body language is eye contact. “Gaze is vital in the flow of natural communication, monitoring of feedback, regulating turn taking, and punctuating emotion. The lack of eye contact shows timidity, embarrassment, shyness, uncertainty and social awkwardness. (Edelmann and Hampson [1]).” Having a camera on top of a monitor, as the vast majority of video endpoints and laptops have, creates the appearance that participants are looking down. If you do look up into the camera, you aren’t looking at the other participant’s faces. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest. Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Of all the problems with using videoconferencing for mediation, eye contact is the real show stopper. Again, corporate room-based systems mitigate this with multiple special cameras and other technological tricks. There are some solutions in the pipeline but they will take a long time to “trickle down to the masses.”
The solution I have settled on is to have a webcam on top of an external monitor set up far enough away that you can't really tell that I am not looking directly at the lens. It would be so much better if Zoom allowed me to rearrange the video panels. My perfect video conferencing app for mediation would allow rearrangement of each video stream and have a simpler breakout room functionality.
> In-person encounters are crucial for establishing trust and building successful teams, according to research Sources of many counterexamples: EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Rift. In all of these games numerous groups of people who have never interacted with each other in person have formed long term successful trusting teams. EverQuest in particular in its first several years r…
My bet is a big part of the issue is webcams not being embedded in the screens. It's literally impossible to have eye contact because either you are looking at the webcam and not seeing other people, or you are looking at your screen. Many animals are very good at recognizing direct vs indirect eye contact and so I would assume the same is true for humans too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AecAXinars&feature=youtu.be
TL;DW - use some cardboard a two way mirror and an external webcam to make a box you place over your laptop so that it lines up the camera + your eyes.
My bet is a big part of the issue is webcams not being embedded in the screens. It's literally impossible to have eye contact because either you are looking at the webcam and not seeing other people, or you are looking at your screen. Many animals are very good at recognizing direct vs indirect eye contact and so I would assume the same is true for humans too.
I don't think I'll be trying this, but it's a really interesting DIY solution to ensuring eye contact when video conferencing. https://youtu.be/2AecAXinars
It's funny that the original title for this article on CBC was actually "Zoom chats short circuit a brain function essential for trust: Don Pittis | CBC News" and the article only mentioned Zoom. :) They changed the title and edited I guess after people pointed out that the research itself was not Zoom specific. I'm amazed how Zoom has become synonomous with "video conferencing" when there are so many other viable so…
It's hard to say whether zoom would have seen this sort of traction without this pandemic. With my own team, it won with one very important feature: the audio processing was better, which meant we didn't have to worry as much about muting or wearing headphones. We wanted to use slack, but on linux you can't share a single window, and with three screens, that's out. Up until recently we couldn't use them for more than…
My bet is a big part of the issue is webcams not being embedded in the screens. It's literally impossible to have eye contact because either you are looking at the webcam and not seeing other people, or you are looking at your screen. Many animals are very good at recognizing direct vs indirect eye contact and so I would assume the same is true for humans too.
I think some(?) smartphones adjust your eyes via post processing to create the illusion of eye-contact when taking selfies, I wonder if this is fast enough to also do it with built-in webcams in laptops.
Before this article influences more discussion, I want to point out that it provides no research relevant to the claim that "video chats short circuit a brain function essential for trust." The only research cited show that face-to-face contact is more effective at soliciting donations than email [1], that non-verbal cues are important for feeling trust [2], something about sunglasses affecting theory of mind, and (i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to say whether zoom would have seen this sort of traction without this pandemic. With my own team, it won with one very important feature: the audio processing was better, which meant we didn't have to worry as much about muting or wearing headphones. We wanted to use slack, but on linux you can't share a single window, and with three screens, that's out. Up until recently we couldn't use them for more than…
This is a bit off-topic, but I can’t seem to use Zoom on my Ubuntu laptop with either Chrome or Firefox. As soon as I enter a call, it sucks up all the available memory until the tab, browser, or whole UI crashes. I can use jit.si or Google meetings with no problem. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
> In-person encounters are crucial for establishing trust and building successful teams, according to research Sources of many counterexamples: EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Rift. In all of these games numerous groups of people who have never interacted with each other in person have formed long term successful trusting teams. EverQuest in particular in its first several years r…
Video games != Real life