Zoom fatigue is real
popsci.com
popsci.com
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 the cheap logitech h390, like 25 bucks each.
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.
+1 for investing in a good headset. Get something that completely covers the ears, and/or has some noise cancelling. I bought a Logitech gaming headset with a good mic and it's made a BIG difference, esp. on days where I'm on 4+ hours for calls.
But I'm shouting into the void about that. Most people won't adapt their behavior when it doesn't impact them personally.
I find it awkward and stressful being on the camera all the time.
It works for non-RTX cards as well with some tweaking (https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1670164). Works marvelously for removing background noise - mic hum, typing, cars driving by.
One of the nice things about it is that you can also filter the output on your end - so if you're in a meeting with someone who is sitting outside near a busy road, or they have a roommate who is gaming on a mechanical keyboard, you can filter the noise out without missing something if that person decides to speak up.
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 mic levels being buried in device manager to be crazy. Also, not having a default output mix, apparently ...
At least games seem to offer a good range of sound settings.
Right click on the speaker icon on the bottom right notification area, then click "Open Sound settings"
If you want the legacy sound control panel that you may have been used to from pre-Win10, then from this dialog click "Sound Control Panel" on the right. (Or Win+R "mmsys.cpl")
On the other hand, screen sharing with interactive control when working together on a shared task is actually better than sitting next to someone on their computer. In person, I can only talk and point at their screen. With interactive screen sharing, I can click, type, and even draw live on their screen.
I spend hours a day in interactive screen share sessions (quasi-pair programming but not really) and never feel the effects of Zoom fatigue. But when I have to use a product without the ability to easily draw or interact, or have a meeting where it’s just about faces in boxes, I immediately feel extra “drag”.
I’m curious to hear if anyone else has had the same experience.
If this is correct, there may be a way to sidestep the issues of Zoom fatigue with better tools and processes (e.g. don’t talk about work, instead do the work together).
I wonder if VR or AR would help with this. If your stand-up was in a VR room then you could look people in the eye, and maybe even move around or gesture with your hands. Wouldn't it be ironic if something mundane like remote work turned out to be the killer Virtual Reality app.
https://theconversation.com/zoom-fatigue-how-to-make-video-c...
EDIT: There is (at least one!)
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 some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.
Whether everybody in the press uses "zoom fatigue" the same way I can't say. In any case, it's the fatigue from suboptimal sound environments is how the author of this thread's article is using it.
I've definitely noticed mental fatigue from the changed aural environment in my house. I normally work from home, but now that my wife is also WFH, I've realized that hearing her on zoom at the same time as I'm in a meeting (or trying to concentrate) just melts my brain. Can't actually comment on zoom sound quality as have a pair of headphones that doesn't drive me completely nuts, and didn't notice anything about it in the previous few years of WFH...
I hope that if video conferencing stays more popular we will see a lot of progress there. Cell phone cameras have shown what can be achieved with enough computation so I hope the same can be done for video conferencing. The current solutions are still very primitive as far as sound and image quality goes.
And if the siblings are right, and the OP is using the term to speak only of fatigue due to bad audio then OP has misappropriated the term.
I'll link the vid in my profile if anyone cares.
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 person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?
That's your 'matter of taste'; for me it's 'what's the difference between text chat and voice chat' (actually, I find text chat far more efficient than voice chat). I know many people who won't turn on their camera while they are not shy in public and you know many people who like voice better over text, so I guess that's just what you like or don't like?
No video? Then they don't have to worry.
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 weird angles we see now.
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
There's a huge difference! You can move around in-person without making sure you're "in frame", subtle body language isn't lost to the shitty framerates and compression of most webcams, speech doesn't get messed up from packet loss or shoddy echo cancellation code, and you are in a shared environment which makes it easier to communicate without having to STARE at the other person/camera the entire time you're talking to them.
You can make eye contact.
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 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! Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.
It is a hard problem to solve. I set up a studio in my office where I have a second monitor and external camera back far enough away so it works. I have looked for solutions and they are generally inaccessible. Room sized immersive systems from Cisco, etc solve it, but they are too expensive for the plebs. I have seen some goofy hacks using see through mirrors and video prompters. There are some productized versions of that but they all seemed to fail. The latest apple phones use ARKit to solve it by manipulating your video, but I have only read about it as a beta feature for facetime.
There is probably some money to be made here, but the gating factor is general awareness of this gaping hole...
How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up below my monitor.)
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?
My team is spread throughout the US and for a few years now my professional life was wall to wall Google Hangouts/Meet. It's been largely business as usual for us.
I wouldn't say there aren't other factors. General anxiety about ones health and paycheck, parents are now largely unpaid teachers, 24/7 news coverage of generally bad news.
It probably all adds up and we just blame it on technology. 5g towers, video games and now Zoom.
There is no question that auditory fatigue is real. The question is only to what extent poor audio is a contributing factor to "Zoom Fatigue".
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 responder as less friendly or focused."
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavir...
[2] https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-combat-zoom-fatigue
[3] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video...
One of the great things about regular phone calls is you can multitask. Walk around the house and straighten up papers, load some dirty dishes in the dishwasher, etc. With video, it feels more like a performance.
Of course it isn't perfect. It depends on people taking turns to speak (as they should, but can't always do if latency causes two people to start talking at once). Still beats the "Brady Bunch" window I only see when I do social meetings with a handful of friends on Friday evenings.
With those it's less of an issue since we're often on the couch in front of the TV with a webcam mounted on top or in the kitchen making dinner with the laptop open on the table anyway.
Fascinating how an entirely new culture and vocabulary sprung up in no time.
Picture quality tends to be so bad that there’s not many non-verbal cues transmitted. Video may cause fatigue - you feel the need look smart. When video is off you can lean back, stand, walk circles, draw things, stare out..
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/3-is-latency-killing-o...
For all of the problems with VR/spatial meetings, boredom is not one, and Hubs makes for a pretty good Powerpoint with fidget spinners.
It requires the office buy into gaming/avatar culture (which I realize is a tall order) but it works for us.
Any tools on linux that can do this?
It only requires pulseaudio (almost all distro's already use it) and is available in most package repositories and as a flatpak.