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I think one of the biggest problems with video calls is the lack of eye contact. I've seen solutions [0] that try to solve it with software but it's not good enough and it's not real eye contact.

A hardware (science fiction) solution could be to have lots of cameras behind the screen. The transmitted image would be from the camera your eyes are actually looking into.

[0] http://mashable.com/2013/08/27/video-call-eye-contact-app/#4...

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I feel like the real problem here is that the camera attached to your screen always seems to be centered above (or below), so you get a skewed looking-down-upon-you situation - either you're staring at a forehead, or the other person looks like they're looking downward.

A solution here would be mounting a camera on either side of the screen for a (very) wide stereoscopic view, and then averaging it in software.

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