How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face (2020)

The author is right about full duplex audio. My opinion is that manufacturers long neglected audio, incorrectly thinking that video and eye contact was the key to more natural conversation (the pandemic did do something to correct that, though)

We run https://cleanfeed.net/ to focus on full-duplex low latency audio (no video). Of course we are dealing mainly with studio environments and good quality equipment, making it a different challenge to a regular meeting tool.

But since the first prototype, we were using it ourselves as an "always on" line between developers. The ability to have 3 or 4-way conference in full duplex with low latency appeared to foster much more of a 'human' relationship than the meeting apps. The lack of picture may even have a positive effect, because it was part of privacy that made people more relaxed.

* Move away from the camera to show more of your torso. The audience will get to read more body language, if they can see more of your body.

* Move the audience’s video as close as possible to the camera (make it smaller), that will have you look like you’re “looking” at the camera versus off to another screen

* have the camera as close to eye level as possible

Mostly it is latency added by webcams, microphones(But our ears are used to delayed audio anyway) and the software. Your webcam probably has >100ms of latency then the app adds >50ms then multiply that by 2x (for two way conversation). Even a display like a TV can have loads of latency.

If you just open up a camera view there's huge latency without it even sending data anywhere. The internet latency is probably only a small portion of over all latency and WiFi latency isn't much either. There's already lots of latency with audio (Perhaps having a microphone could make audio travel faster then through air?)

I wish people would take latency more seriously. Using a rolling shutter, encoding a single line at a time and sending it via UDP could probably save almost all the latency. Sub 30ms latency IMO would make it much better.

The thing which proved life changing for me was ditching WiFi for Ethernet in the home office. I wasn't able to lay cables but I did buy an ethernet over power adapter (you can also get them for coaxial). Speed took a hit but I didn't have the same issues I previously had with packet loss, even after manual tweaks to avoid interference with neighbours.

> Prefer Zoom to most alternatives

I consider this irresponsible in the face of the Zoom CEO saying to moneteize the knowledge they have about you. Very different from face-to-face in my opinion.

Face-to-face is not only about interaction of people present, it's about eavesdropping as well.

Praise for the rest and for caring about the other participants.

I sorted through the many headsets at current when I joined and settled on the relatively cheap logitech H340, and made it standard at the company. You can hear yourself and the microphone is very good. I consistently get told that I have better audio than others, and wired headphones just work. One other nice effect is that as communication headphones they don't pass as much very high and very low frequency stuff as hi fi headphones (despite their claimed frequency responce), and this cuts a lot of background crap out. I was on a group call with one person in a car, and the people wearing bose headphones complained about the auwful background noise... which I could not hear. This is a lesson from aviation and radio, you only need 300hz-10khz for voice.

11. Turn off the view of yourself. In almost no other situation I know of are you staring at a mirror of yourself while you're talking to someone else.

One thing that’s missing in video calls is eye contact.

You both are looking at each other’s faces, which are not the camera.

Seems like it would be possible to transform the person’s eyes so they’re looking straight forward, not down.

This matters more in applications like therapy over video calls.

If you have a GPU, also check out Nvidia broadcast. It removes webcam background sure, but it can also do some seriously high quality noise cancellation, much like the krisp.ai service does from the article.

It can even run the same noise cancellation algo on incoming audio! So you can filter colleagues' noise for yourself if they don't want to bother

Discussed at the time:

Tips for immersive video calls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610166 - Sept 2020 (138 comments)

I said this last time and I'll bring it up again: quality of equipment is not the problem, poor UX design is the problem.

1. We still don't share a common digital space when having meetings, because everyone sees tiles in a different order. "Let's go around the table and give our updates!" Uh, in what order? There is a lot of power in the subtle social cues available when everyone knows who you are talking (or listening) to by shifting towards them.

2. There's still no effective way to non-verbally signal that someone wants to speak. If everyone was push-to-talk, then holding down the unmute button would let the UI emphasize your tile and signal to others. This would cut down on verbally stepping on each other. Nobody uses those "raise hand" buttons, because they are too single-purpose and relatively high effort.

3. Often, there's no way to tell at a glance if you're muted. I can't believe Zoom still does this: you have to move your mouse to get it to show you the UI. Why are you hiding the UI.

4. What is the point of reactions appearing on your own tile? You're not talking: nobody is looking at you. Reactions should appear on the tile you are reacting to!

It's small things like this that make video calls a mess, and nothing's changed since the beginning of the pandemic except for video filters.

Both myself and many of my colleagues have done most/all of these things and IMHO our video calls are better but still fatiguing and nowhere near as good as face to face

that TFA recommends Zoom above all other options is strange. it has very poor design decisions in my experience and no longer works reliably without being installed.

also as debate from an HN post from a couple days ago covered well, using an external camera instead of webcam is a fool's errand. my how I've tried.

the most important change for reducing fatigue in my experience: turn video off. audio only.

I've had good luck with used Cisco/Webex video conferencing hardware off eBay. The audio and video quality is typically better than most laptops and you don't have the video/audio encoding fighting for processor time with whatever your computer is running.

The biggest issue is that some video conferencing services don't support standard protocols, so you can't connect to Zoom without buying a special license. A WebEx subscription with some of the newer equipment is sufficient to connect to Teams and Google Meet through WebRTC as well as any standards based systems (Chime, etc.)

Outdated and reads like an ad for Zoom. One of the recommendations is literally "use zoom because it's better".

Also on shaky ground is the advice to use a DSLR camera as web cam. As pointed out in a recent discussion here, the problem with adding more devices to the chain is... more devices in the chain.

Dedicated diffuse lighting, wireless headsets, separate cameras etc.. participants will need to be patient while you prepare and configure your film set.

I used a wireless headset for awhile, but swapped it for a wired headset after too many times joining meetings without the headset pairing in time.

Settings for 'original audio' on zoom are missing on desktop linux. As I imagine HN skews towards that OS, I'd encourage you to write to them asking for support (or avoid zoom altogether; but that might be impossible for some).

If you really want that full-duplex audio experience on linux today, disable audio on the call and move everyone to https://cleanfeed.net. This is not an ideal workflow, but it gets you there.

Why other products don't just take audio seriously is a pity.

One advice: if you have two monitors, put one with the conferencing software and camera to the side, so you have to turn your head to look at the conference. One issue in video conferencing with multiple people is inability to tell if the person is actually paying attention. That way you will give clear indication that you are not engaged in something on your main screen.

As discussed lighting is very important. One thing that makes a difference is the brightness of the monitor, at least if you have a large/bright monitor which can serve as a light source. If your face is too dark, increase monitor brightness. If you're in a dark room and you start to look like an alien, decrease monitor brightness.

All these people talking about "a DSLR is too difficult to setup and you're going to waste time at the beginning of the meeting getting everything going."

I've been using my DSLR as a webcam for the last 2 years. I set it up on a short tripod so it sits just over the top of my monitor. The only time I have to screw around with setup is when I take it down to shoot my kids for family Christmas card. Takes 5 minutes and then everything is back in place.

It never ceases to amaze me how much a bunch of so-called hackers can argue about something they've never even tried to do. Hours spent bickering back and forth about something that takes literally 5 minutes to test out.

Anyway, I use a fixed 50mm lens on my camera, which is a classic lens for portrait dimensions and gives me a very shallow depth of field to blur out the junk in the room behind me.

Someone should write an AV scoring system. Measuring all the important components. Your AV score should be displayed alongside your name in meetings in order to shame people into improving their dreadful audio and video.

The latency introduced along with the decreased amount of body language will always take a lot of spontaneity out of conversations, and if you have a policy of muting yourself unless you want to speak, it's much harder to get a conversation going fast enough.

One of the questions was how to mount a smartphone. I use a car mount, specifically the iOttie one touch... But any extendable car mount would work. Just suction cup it to the back of your monitor and you're set

where do you find $20-80 nice camera ? most of the nice camera Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony I find cost thousands of dollars. I want to replace my Logitech webcam

It was cheaper to disable video and change my profile pic to "SEELE 01 SOUND ONLY SELECTED".

Back in 2014, I was a freelance software consultant. I was doing some web and database development, and also helping my mother out with her consultancy doing database reports. We were traveling around the country, meeting with clients. My mom has some mobility issues due to some old, bad knee and foot injuries. She really should have been in a wheelchair, but most of these places didn't have access ramps or even elevators. So she often just sucked it up and walked the blocks and climbed the stairs.

I was pretty dissatisfied with my work at the time. I was spending a lot of time arguing with an IT manager who thought he knew things about software development on one hand, or just writing boring-ass Crystal Reports on the other. Then this newfangled device came out called the Oculus Rift DK2. I also had a Leap Motion device that I had glued to the front of it. It was an exciting time, as decent enough VR to not make the majority of people sick or have headaches hadn't been available--and certainly not at a consumer price point--until then.

I hacked around on some things, got a small amount of notoriety amongst other burgeoning VR developers at the time (I'd basically made the first JavaScript library for making VR-capable apps), and then one day I got a call from this company called AltspaceVR. They wanted me to interview for a job.

We did it in Altspace. This was my first experience with VR chat. The person I talked to had an HTC Vive dev kit. We stood in a futuristic room and talked, face to face. And it just worked. It felt like actually talking to a person. The conversation was so easy, compared to 2D teleconferencing. I wasn't distracted by my own video feed, worried about how I looked or whether I was providing enough "camera contact". There was body language and a feeling of the bodily presence of the other person.

It was immediately obvious that this was far superior than traditional teleconferencing. I had a brainwave about the future of work, meetings with clients without having to travel, my mom no longer destroying her knees, no longer having to fly around the country. And I could be involved on working on this future! If I just abandoned everyone I knew and moved to California.

I asked the guy I was interviewing with if he really thought that was necessary. He said they really liked having everyone in the same room together. I asked him what were we doing, just now, talking to each other as if we were in the same room. He vacillated, admitted they weren't dogfooding their own product.

And that's when I decided that I had to work in VR, had to work on productivity apps and not games, and had to dogfood it and stick to living on the East Coast. Now I'm the head of R&D at a foreign language training company, where I make a VR teleconferencing app for people to meet together in culturally-appropriate environs to practice their language skills.

Just won’t ever be. Once you realize the delay is what’s causing you to be exhausted, what’s causing meetings to never spawn creative solutions, what’s making it difficult to focus.

you soon realize that only certain meetings work over video and some are only worth doing IRL.

Video is already better because I can fart ok mute and no one will know.

I'll get all that stuff he recommends if work pays for it. I wouldn't spend a dollar of my own money to make zoom meetings "better" and neither should anyone else who doesn't own their own business. I still wouldn't turn my camera on unless I was absolutely required to.