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Comment by lostdog | Hacker News Reader

Lots of normal things about human interaction are broken in Zoom meetings.

* You can't have a normal conversation with that much delay. Every time you talk you're probably interrupting someone, and that starts to wear on you.

* You can't have any side chats with your neighbors before and after the meeting, making everyone seem less like a person.

* You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have to remain presentable and vigilant.

* There's no sense of space. You can't look over at person if whomever is talking just teleports to the center of the screen. Or if the layout is fixed, sound isn't coming from anywhere in particular, so you need to search around for who's talking. And everyone on screen is looking a random direction.

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So why the fixation on a video call? I'm probably just an old curmudgeon, but to me the benefits do not out weigh the oddities being discussed. Everyone wearing their pieces of flair with their "personalized" backgrounds are tiresome.

I can see the benefits of a screen share/presentation, but I really don't need to see the other people involved. I don't care about tone of voice. I get sarcasm. For the people that don't, then even if they can see them, the sarcasm isn't more/less because it's a video call.

Video calls to me are just another version of "Hey look at me!!!! I'm special"

In part due to the latency noted elsewhere in the comments, I find myself interrupting people more when I'm remote. With video on, the visual cue of someone getting ready to start talking makes that easier to avoid.

Secondarily, I have a much better time assessing whether other attendees are following a conversation. If I'm feeling lost, but everyone else looks like they're following along, maybe it's just me — and I'll sit tight and try to catch up. If others look bewildered, I'll start asking questions.

> With video on, the visual cue of someone getting ready to start talking makes that easier to avoid.

You have the possibility of using an actual raised hand to signal that you want to interrupt a discussion that has gone astray. But that only works in settings where all participants are visible even when silent.

Maybe someone needs to add a feature to their video calling solution where you can press a button to "raise your hand".

Maybe this is sarcasm, buy Zoom has that exact feature.

I used that feature to "raise my hand" in my first ever Zoom meeting. The host didn't realize it until I raised my actual hand on video.

meet.jit.si has that feature. It seems really superior to Zoom (no account needed, links in natural language, great UI, good sound/video quality), I don't know why more people don't use it.

Cisco meeting software has this and its almost never used.

For me, body language. I hate voice calls because I'm lost without it.

It can help with loneliness when you're living alone, isolating alone, and are used to having people around you for 8 hours a day in an office.

This isn't true for everyone, but certainly is for many.

I have absolutely no use for videoconferencing professionally (and I work remotely, and have for nearly 20 years), but in the era of Corona I find we're doing Facetime or Zoom with friends and family for social reasons, and enjoying it for the most part.

I still find a video call more draining than physical interaction, but in the absence of the latter I'll take this in order to visit with our friends. We have a standing Friday happy hour with 2 other couples we used to see "in real life" all the time, and we look forward to it. My cycling group has taken to setting up "training Zooms" we can join so we can all suffer together on our indoor trainers, and that's nice, too.

What's interesting to me is that, now that video calling is becoming more mainstream, I wonder how much of it will stay after Corona, and how that will affect long-distance friendships.

Different people think different. Some people would be happy with written only. Some people like audio even though it is slower. Some people need to see other people. It is all a compromise to get different people to work together. Sometimes that means that I use mediums of communication that don't work well for me.

It seems like a "compromise" that is entirely in favor of the visual people though.

Email is a compromise to the readers. It works out more or less. There is no good answer but if you understand it exists you can work with it. Sometimes that means you have to work hard in a medium you don't like, other times you can suggest yours is better and win.

At this point I'm one of the few people still putting up the video feed, and I'm feeling pretty depressed. There was at least some interaction with that dumb feed of peoples heads, now I feel alone and like I'm talking to a wall. You'd be surprised how much you rely on feedback and validation from body language alone when it's abruptly been eliminated from your life.

I agree 100%, voice is fine for communication. The video should only be deployed for presentations, graphs, and other visual media that is necessary to get your point across. Facetime is usless unless it's with the parentals every couple of months.

In our (academic) meetings, people generally default to switching off their camera when there's more than a handful of participants. I find this much less stressful. I can also do some physical activity which helps concentration if I'm just listening.

It also puts a lot less pressure on the network connections involved when they aren't also loaded with 8 real-time video streams.

> if the layout is fixed, sound isn't coming from anywhere in particular, so you need to search around for who's talking.

I’ve wondered about this - why aren’t individual speakers (people) each placed somewhere different on the stereo plane? Is it because the video is in front of us and having people sound like there coming from the sides could be distracting, by drawing our attention away from the screen?

It must have been tried - why doesn’t it work?

Dolby Voice [1] provides this, and BlueJeans has support [2] for it. I've only been on one call with it, but as someone who (even before current circumstances) spends 4-6 hours/day on video calls.. I'm very intrigued by the idea.

If you want to google more, the term generically is 'positional audio'. Dolby calls theirs 'Voice Placement'.

1: https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/products/dolby-voic... (ctrl-f for 'voice placement')

2: https://www.bluejeans.com/products/rooms/dolby-voice-confere...

Teamspeak (although that's audio only) allows you to place other speakers around you in 3D; I haven't tried it much, but I imagine it could be quite useful on certain situations.

> * You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have to remain presentable and vigilant.

Feel free to hit that "Turn off Video" button from time to time. I make liberal use of it.

I wonder if VR meetings will take off because of this crisis. Most of the issues you mention would be solved by VR, except the audio latency, which is the biggest hurdle.

For mass adoption the headsets would have to become even more comfortable and lightweight, the displays faster and higher resolution, with lower price and easier setup.

I haven't followed the latest developments, so we might be a couple of generations away from this, assuming the industry can keep progressing during downtime.

We did some meetings in VR. It definitely has some upsides, eg you can stand in a virtual circle and you get to see who people are looking at which makes at least that aspect of meetings better than video.

The big downside is the friction of getting it set up. Inevitably someone has a dead battery or their VR setup decides it absolutely needs to update drivers for the Nth time this week, and then everyone is waiting or unsure what is going on.

Also inevitably the same 3 or 4 people join all the Zooms with their camera off, and mic off, which creates a disconnect. This is akin to showing up to an in-person meeting under a giant blanket, only the sound quality of someone talking from underneath a blanket is significantly better than Zoom.

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