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Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

One reason why online meetings suck so much! I can't look at the camera and people at the same time, there's no real way to make eye contact.

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A company I was interviewing had a document they shared with applicants with interviewing guidance. One tip was to look directly into the camera when speaking so the interviewer feels you are present and attentive. Imagine two people looking at a camera instead of each other in an absurd attempt to make video chat more natural.

I just can't stop glancing back to myself. I always wonder about people who look at the same spot without glancing away frequently - do they have the self control that I lack, or do they just have their camera right near their own face and are looking at themselves the whole time?

If you turn off your self view it’s a lot easier to stay focused, I have found. Overall quality of calls is much higher for me.

Totally agree though a lot of video conference software mysteriously doesn’t allow you to disable this.

I resorted to getting an external web cam with a small tripod so I can position the camera in the middle of my monitor.

I take it you're not a fan of the wonderful AI-based eye contact correction solutions on the market?

I would say this paper (which to be fair, I only skimmed) shows why that doesn't work–you don't actually want constant eye contact!

So you're saying there's a market for AI-based intermittent eye contact correction solutions?

Well, it would have to know the correct time to initiate and break eye contact, which seems hard.

so you want keyboard controlled eye contact correction?

No, because I don't consciously think about when to make eye contact, so a keyboard I have to consciously press wouldn't work.

I think we'd need some kind of eye-tracking system which can detect when I'm trying to make eye contact, and then actually make eye contact for me.

And both people need it, so when you're trying to make eye contact, the other party's system will automatically make eye-contact with you (slightly delayed so it doesn't look they've been staring at you the entire time) and vice versa. Who looks away first though?

If the meeting attendees are laid out in a grid presumably it could tell when you’re looking at a specific person. Ideally it’d only send the corrected stream to the person being looked at.

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