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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

I think it's because, in real life, you can tell who's looking at you and when. There's key components of body language that are based in who is paying attention to who. In a videoconference, this is all missing. You can't tell who's looking at you or not, so that mean anyone could be looking at you, so you act like everyone is looking at you all the time, you feel the need to control your presentation more, that causes fatigue.

Real-world group conversations are not like that at all. If you're tired or you have nothing to say, you can just be in a corner listening to other people speak, nobody will mind, and you don't feel observed. That's a lot more like when you have your camera off.

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This happened a lot with Zoom calls for my then-four-year-old daughter's classes too. All the kids hated it because they were looking at the picture of a friend and talking to them, but the friend didn't know they were so they weren't listening to them, and they all got incredibly frustrated. As adults we can have the theoretical knowledge about how these things work, but it does cut out a lot of helpful cues.

For me, I also think the slight audio / video lag is really difficult in a similar way. It makes conversational fluency really hard, such as when you can interject, or knowing when someone has finished. It means that conversations tend to become a series of monologues, and that's a really tedious way of having a conversation.

I think there is also the cultural assumption that you could always be away doing something else when on a call remotely.

For instance, when everyone is in the same room, you’re manifesting you dedicated your time to the meeting. From there, even if participants look at their mail or do something that might not be related, or just look bored, there is some leeway given by the fact they are there in the first place.

In most remote settings, I find this leeway is way thinner, and it is less accepted to be distracted by something else, people will be apologizing in more specific ways to justify they weren’t listenning.

My manager would ask everyone would to raise their hands from keyboard randomly in a half-joking manner... to ensure everyone is focusing to the meeting, and not working.

or, point out "hey you have something else on screen because white screenlight flashed on your face"

Leaving this company in a month, although they're paying me 2x the local average SE salary here in Sweden.

There is nothing happy about working for control freaks, and slightly higher net salary won't magically turn it into a good place to work... sounds like a good idea to depart

2x is not "slightly". You can see it as the amount of premium an employer has to pay to get away with things like that.

A well-prepared meeting is fast-paced and keeps everyone genuinely involved.

While calling it out like that is crass, I do wish people wouldn't do other things during meetings. I get that these meetings are presumably over-long, but perhaps that's because half the participants aren't actually paying attention...

Having %100 attention of all participants is for sure an expectation to be had, in an ideal scenario where meetings are organized in an ideal configuration of members/agenda/duration.

But if you invite everyone to every meeting, have no agenda, and have awkward silences in the meeting you called while trying to come up with stuff to talk about... then surely people will try to get some work done in parallel.

There is an optimum somewhere on the line.

Even if you have 5 people for 30 min on the call, it's totally understandable that one or two of them find it mildly boring but here and there relevant. For instance they are expert in one of the field touched by your project and they sometimes need to react.

In your ideal state, the choice is for them to leave the meeting altogether and find something else they can focus more on, or to focus 100% on the meeting and spend half of their time religiously listening to stuff they don't really need to hear.

In my experience the result of the second choice is people being more and more reticent to come to meetings, not just because of some hypothetical time lost, but because it's mentally painful.

As an added bonus, instead of having one meeting with 5 people, you need to make 3 with only the parts each members fully care about, and eventually a few more down the line when what they each say in isolation doesn't make sense when assembled together.

> You can't tell who's looking at you or not, so that mean anyone could be looking at you, so you act like everyone is looking at you all the time, you feel the need to control your presentation more,

so you keep staring at your own image, which means everyone is staring at their own image, which means no one is looking at your image, which means you don’t need to care what you look like,

It's the Panopticon effect. It doesn't matter if there's somebody looking, what matters is that there may be, and you can't know.

This is why I almost always minimize my own video on my screen. Just seeing myself makes me really self conscious.

Unless I’m presenting or speaking for more than an interjection, I generally turn off the sending of video. There’s little value (IMO) in 320p/720p low bitrate “facial expressions” which are just as often compression artifacts as they are information about emotional state.

Maybe once video calls are routinely 1080p/2160p it will matter more, but 320p (the default for most systems today) at a low bitrate isn’t really doing much. You might as well shut it off unless you’re leading the meeting at that moment.

Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light.

> Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light.

I recently did a fair bit of research into this exact setup and landed on a Logitech StreamCam and a Elgato Key Light.

Well worth the money if you’re interested in achieving a high consumer grade level of quality, just be sure to purchase an adapter for the StreamCam as it is (infuriatingly) wired with a USB C connector.

I find it infuriating when things still use old, non-reversible USB. Everything I plug my Logitech 4K camera into has USB-C ports.

That’s fair, but for something like a 1080 webcam used by amateur streamers, USBC seems like a poor choice. Perhaps there’s a bandwidth issue I’m missing.

720 is the default for Google Meet and gives a decent quality picture imo. There's definitely value in seeing others at that resolution - the restricting factor is people's unreliable or narrow bandwidth internet connection.

also why I don't like seeing pictures of people everywhere (e.g. Outlook, WebEx), especially myself. It's not really useful information and only distracting. At least give us an option if we want to see all this stuff (in Outlook it's possible to hide profile pictures, in WebEx it's not).

I don't do video calls, but my partner does them often for work. The other day she mentioned that you're able to see who is looking at your video feed because their eyes looks directly at you (akin to them looking into the webcam).

I'm not sure if she was mistaken, or if there's some kind of eye tracking/image processing stuff going on to do this. FYI it was Microsoft Teams.

That’s not a feature of Teams. I know Microsoft had been testing processing eyes so that it looks like you’re straight into the camera, but no there’s no reliable way to do that based on who’s feed you’re watching.

Some Sony still cameras have sometimes done funny things with the eyes. A friend bought one in Japan which made the eyes of any subject larger. I can’t seem to find anything online about it, but it was very strange before you realised.

Magnifying eyes is common on Purikura machine in Japan. Some cameras including smartphones implement similar feature. I believe all camera have plain shoot mode.

That only works if they are on a laptop.

I work off a desktop with two 28" monitors and my camera sits above them in the center, and the meeting has to be on the left monitor or the right monitor, not straddling the middle, so you will never get that feeling of me looking directly at you.

I am, however, thinking of making something that deepfakes the perspective change correctly.

I am, however, thinking of making something that deepfakes the perspective change correctly.

Or you could, you know, move the camera. I keep mine centered on top of my main monitor.

Or, you know, move your camera 14 inches to one side or the other.

Won't do much, it still looks at me from above because the monitor is so big.

Well, don't deepfake it. Strap a big long selfie stick to your head and hang the camera in front of your face :-)

I have two different setups, one with a laptop that has an external monitor; one that is my tower with two monitors. On both, the camera is basically over the monitor I use for video conferencing. I don't care if somebody notices me staring at the other monitor - it's no worse than staring at the desk during a face-to-face meeting while somebody else is talking.

Not at all true. For that to work, there would have to be, yes, eye tracking and a lot of image processing to change where your gaze appeared to be, but also knowledge of the physical size of the screen, the location of that particular person's feed on the screen, and where the screen is in relation to the camera. Now, it's possible that a lot of that could be inferred if it's assumed the screen is not moved in relation to the camera, and a lot of work went into tracking window locations even as you move things around, but that's a LOT of effort to expend for such a minor feature (let alone the uncanny valley effect if you don't get the image processing perfect, including the transitional "eye moved from the document you were looking at, to looking at them" - the software would have to somehow note that rather than just looking over an inch, you actually looked up 7 inches, and render that realistically).

Easiest way to confirm this is not true, though (rather than just describe the challenge involved) - have a Zoom/Teams/whatever call 1-on-1. As you're talking to the person, and they're talking back to you, note where their eyes are. 95% of the time they're going to be below where your eyes would "meet", i.e., the camera is at the top of their monitor/laptop, and they're looking at you on screen. In fact, I've had some people -never- 'meet' my gaze, because they never become self-aware enough to "oh, I should look at my camera when I am talking".

> In fact, I've had some people -never- 'meet' my gaze, because they never become self-aware enough to "oh, I should look at my camera when I am talking".

I'm not sure that looking into the camera is that important in a one-to-one setting. I'm specifically not talking about a "broadcast", like when you address an assembly and the communication is expected to go both ways.

To me, the reason why we look at a person when talking together is to see their reactions, and for them to see ours. Even in real life, and in particular when we speak, we don't look at the other person's eyes 100% of the time.

So in the case of video chat, where the "eyes" (the camera) is completely separate from the face, looking into the eyes cuts you off from their reaction, as you'll only see it in your peripheral vision. However, even if you see their eyes never meet yours, you're able to infer whether they're looking at your video or reading something else. And the most important part, their reactions, is still there.

To me, the whole point of video chat, as opposed to a phone call, is to have this additional channel of communication. If you're not looking at the person with whom you're talking, you might as well not use video at all.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply looking at the camera to meet the person's gaze is the "right" thing to do, or expected, or any such thing. Just that I've had times where I've thought "My video shows me looking down; I should probably look at the camera to give the appearance of eye contact".

This video shows a project to create a one-way mirror that allows a person to view their monitor while 'looking at' the camera.

https://youtu.be/2AecAXinars

If I was planning to do any interviews I would definitely build and use this.

It also makes me wonder, when people are staring into the camera if they are looking at a photo instead of the camera lens.

This doesn't even account for the number of people who have multimonitor setups and no particular connection between camera position and where the call window might be.

> oh, I should look at my camera when I am talking

I'm not a really outgoing person but when I talk in real life I'm one of those people who tend to look into someone's eyes a lot when talking and listening, probably 97% eye contact from my end if I had to guess. It feels very weird not to do this but looking into the webcam is much worse for me because you can't see the other person at the same time.

I haven't figured out why I prefer eye contact, but I wonder if it has to do with being able to see what the other person is doing and how they're reacting to the conversation. You can pick up a lot of information when looking at someone's face.

I know this is something Apple FaceTime does. I recently noticed that when I looked at myself during a video call it looked like I was making direct eye contact, whereas when I looked at the camera it looked like I was looking away. I thought maybe I was imagining things but I found this article to back it up: https://www.fastcompany.com/90372724/welcome-to-post-reality...

There’s also a video where someone shows how your eyes get distorted to cause the effect, but I can’t find it right now.

How would this work when the call has many people on it?

And poor her - big Teams meeting are actually awful and large meeting with it are not good.

A lot of my team members were in Australia which appears to have dismal internet, a terrible connection to New Zealand, or both.

Basic reasoning will tell you that people who “look at you” during a video call are actually people who look at their camera.

Looking at it from the other way round, putting the active window (whatever it is) right below the camera makes the other side feel like getting attention.

Making the window small enough to not generate much eye movement when scrolling around is a refinement.

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