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Comment by ollifi | Hacker News Reader

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back.

It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip.

Some people get really bothered about this idea and probably if you are working on independent tasks you don't need to be so connected. For tight teamwork I found it to be the least bad option.

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That sounds weird and awesome at the same time. Does the face move at all? Have you thought of using facerigging software?

I wonder what you think of virtual remote space with advanced face rigged avatars as the future?

0] https://facerig.com

We actually have a feature in Pragli that sort of does this... https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/

Yeah I saw that but it's not as fluid yet. I am thinking of 3d faces with realistic facial texture and expressions.

Btw, nice product!

Oh yeah that would be awesome... I definitely think that's the future

You note in the article that the detection occasionally causes some lag in your overall application. Have you looked into a background worker for the task?

We actually discovered that the CPU increase was not caused by the detection, but rather by the CSS animation of the SVG moving around.

It turns out that the detection itself is very fast and lightweight, so there was no need to optimize (background workers would've been a good idea though).

We somewhat optimized the CSS animation, but it's still not where we'd like to be... if anyone on here knows how to improve CSS animation performance beyond dropping frame rate / shortening the animation, I'd love to know. Tried some obvious things (z index, will-change).

I phrased it wrong. It was a stream from webcam to indicate I was there. I don't think it needs to be good quality or fast frame rate though. Maybe even better if it's really pixellated. Just something to remind people. If somebody forgot to turn on the tv I had to mute the chatter in my end as well, because people very easily start having too private conversations.

Avatar could be quite fun but maybe too uncanny as well.

We used a similar setup to co-ordinate a project team split between New York and London. At both locations, at the end of the row of desks, we had a monitor at about head height on a stand running a google hangout. You could immediately see who was about and what kind of activity they were doing and then gather round the monitor for conversations etc.

This is very common in some industries to have always-on two-way screens connected to workers in another office. A company called Tandberg was the main maker of them. It’s owned by Cisco now but everyone still calls them Tandbergs.

Typically you would have one at the end of a row of desks to “extend” that row to another row physically located in another office and vice versa

I love Atlassian's implementation of this[1] where they installed "portals" around their offices, connected to a counterpart in another office - if you want to chat to someone you can walk over to the relevant portal and do so, but because they're always on and in public places they also facilitate the sort of spontaneous conversations you get when you bump into someone in the kitchen while making a cup of coffee.

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/developer-lives-save...

Genuinely curious: do people actually use these at Atlassian? In college we had a portal to another college that looked very similar, and it was never used.

At one point I worked at what had been Tandberg; and there were a couple of teams there with remote workers who were represented by a desk with Tandberg terminal on it with a always on session running all day.

That doesn't sound bad at all. Having a webcam pointed at my face all day and showing on some monitor would be very discomforting.

Set it up right and you could look all the way around the globe at the back of your own head :-)

Using always-on speaker phones (or equiv) during critical periods is pretty great.

I'd be keen to try misc variations of your telepresence strategy. From lowest to highest tech.

I'm also now intrigued by a walkie-talkie, CB radio (push to talk) style approach.

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