Comment by pmg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmg | Hacker News Reader

Webcams feel like a deadend technology like self-rewinding cassettes on the eve of the release of the compact disc.

The fidelity is garbage relative to something like a DSLR inside an Errol Box[1] and miles away from Starline style holography[2]. Eye contact is poor. Putting in a software filter to fix eye contact should be universal practice at this point. Hell even getting basic ring light next to your lens is universal amongst gen-z streamers and completely absent from gen-x remote workers.

With the chip shortage mostly over I'm amused how many people working at MANGA, nominally our most proficient tech workers bringing in half a million dollar salaries, are just phoning it in with garbage setups, trivially fixed by watching a 15 minute youtube video on how to position your desk to capture natural light, use a wired microphone that you already have in your drawer somewhere, and check three boxes under settings.

I'm not proposing to get a studio, just maybe give your fellow humans the decency of picking up your emotional nuance if you're transitioning to not seeing them in person.

[1] https://ma.tt/2020/05/ceo-video-streaming

[2] https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/

You know what's vastly worse than a co-worker whose camera has a sub-optimal image quality? A co-worker who's constantly struggling to get their overkill setup to behave, wasting everyone's time while they fix the mix on their audio or switch cameras because their mirrorless camera turned itself off from thermal overload yet again.

100% this

Literally just use a wired microphone for instance and not only will one have better fidelity but one also immediately gets past the "Can you guys here me?" one finds with airpods or fancy wireless gaming headsets.

Not entirely sure if this was meant as satire, but in case it wasn't: If I wanted to be judged on my physical looks or the quality in which those are presented to others over the wire, I would have been working in the film industry.

Genuinely believe a loss in fidelity moves us from acceptable telepresence to uncanny valley.

Landlines had exceptional fidelity and let one pick up the nuance of a person's emotional state. Today's cellular connections not so much. Thankfully things like Apple Facetime (audio only) recapture some of that.

Likewise with a high quality webcam I think it's important to treat your coworkers with respect by giving them the grace of seeing your body language in high resolution if you're going to opt out of physical meetings. Remote work is fine, just don't phone it in with the equivalent of 2000's era potato camera.

This addendum clarifies your reasoning a lot!

I agree in that improved audiovisual quality would be beneficial, but, at least for regular video calls, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect for people to go out of their way to do better than the quality their (not too old) laptop provides - not past ensuring they're in a reasonably quiet environment with halfway decent lighting anyway.

Besides, recent generations of laptops are finally shifting to better quality webcams and microphones. We'll get to where we'd both like it to be, eventually :)

I grew up just as landlines were giving way to cell phones. How did high fidelity let us pick up on emotional state?

I grew up in similar times. What am I noticing is that only one model of cellphone (no adv) can give me a decent sound of my companion. But I did not have that mis-experience using very old phones.

Interesting, I'm curious, what phone/carrier was that? If you were able to get a decent sound on one phone, it sounds like then there's nothing intrinsically/insurmountably wrong with cell phones.

I intentionally scale down my video as I don't want to be seen. Being on video requires a lot of cognitive effort, which I'd rather conserve to do actual work.

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