All of these video fatigue articles ignore the eye contact problem. From a paper I wrote on mediating over video: 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 Hampso…
> Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.
How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up below my monitor.)
All of these video fatigue articles ignore the eye contact problem. From a paper I wrote on mediating over video: 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 Hampso…
> Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest. How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up below my monitor.)
Common wisdom is that you want your camera to be just above eye level slightly looking down on you. The camera pointed up at your face is "unflattering."
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…
For me seeing people on webcam is a totally different experience than from seeing them in person. I don’t get any of the signals I get from being in the same room so for me it’s basically useless and even distracting. 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 we…
Yeah, I was talking about this with a friend recently. I think that straight video conferencing is now pretty commoditized and cheap to execute. Facetime, Meet, Duo, Teams, Zoom are fairly undifferentiated. And you see products like Slack just drop video calling in without a lot of fanfare. I think there's going to be another generation on very near horizon where we see video software that is much more fit to purpose. One-on-one calls is not the same use case and business meetings, presentations, fitness classes, classroom situations. Streaming video and audio is easy, but there is a lot of room in the user experience and modes of interaction to build more useful products than just turning on a camera and microphone. Solving things like "eye contact" or the equivalent could be done. And we definitely shouldn't stop at just trying to model in-person interaction and really look at what the medium allows that wasn't possible before.
For me seeing people on webcam is a totally different experience than from seeing them in person. I don’t get any of the signals I get from being in the same room so for me it’s basically useless and even distracting. 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 we…
Yeah, I was talking about this with a friend recently. I think that straight video conferencing is now pretty commoditized and cheap to execute. Facetime, Meet, Duo, Teams, Zoom are fairly undifferentiated. And you see products like Slack just drop video calling in without a lot of fanfare. I think there's going to be another generation on very near horizon where we see video software that is much more fit to purpose…
“Solving things like "eye contact" or the equivalent could be done.“
I bet if you had several cameras you could compute a video feed where people have direct eye contact instead of seeing them staring at a screen during a conversation
I telecommuted for years and almost never used a webcam. A shared desktop has way more potential for something really interesting and valuable being displayed. 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…
Getting a headset is important, but it doesn't help with latency. That huge amounts of latency are somehow considered acceptable in these communication channels drives me mad.
We optimized for cost by making things packet-switched.
The latency for phone calls on copper wires back in the late 90s was great, but I am definitely glad that a modern video call doesn't require paying, say $3.00/min/person in the way that long distance did back then.
> Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest. How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up below my monitor.)
Common wisdom is that you want your camera to be just above eye level slightly looking down on you. The camera pointed up at your face is "unflattering."
I am 6'4" tall and so everyone is extremely used to looking up at me and it even can feel very strange seeing a camera looking down at me ;P. But I am more asking about stuff like "there is research which shows that if you are looking down you look like you are hiding something but if you look up it looks like you are arrogant or distracted or [fill in the blank]", not "is this a flattering camera angle" ;P.
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 wonder if premium virtual conferencing solutions will pop up. People might pay more to be guaranteed calls would go over dedicated networks and high performance servers; the service provider can send the participants custom hardware (perhaps even appliances) to improve quality at the ends. I'm unsure how much of the quality degradation is at the last mile, which this sort of service won't be able to help much.
You would think this sort of functionality would be implemented in sound cards but I can't think of any significant advancement in audio processing in years.
Aw man, I'm quite often found wanting audio compression - narrowing of the difference in loudness of sound output - but neither Win10 nor Kubuntu seem to be able to do this ootb. It would be really good to have on a TV too (no more super-loud explosions interspersed with barely audible speech), and I'm amazed that YouTube seemingly doesn't normalise sound levels at all. As a relatively new Win10 user I find access to…
Should be doable in any Linux Distro using pulseaudio (which i think kubuntu does):
wiht module-ladspa-sink you can apply arbitrary ladspa plugins to your stream, there are plenty.
And i think alsa also hast native compression support, but not sure.
> 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?
There are a bunch of articles about it. National Geographic [1], Harvard Business Review [2], BB [3]. One of the theories is that we have to work harder to pick up on non-verbal cues, which consumes energy. A data point from the BBC article: "One 2014 study by German academics showed that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively: even delays of 1.2 seconds made people perceive the…
Brief confusion and distraction is not the same as malaise.