[sexyflanders]

Latency is the issue for me more so than eye contact.

On video chat sometimes I’ll say something like “mmhmm” or “yes” in agreement, and accidentally throw the speaking party off because my comment was delivered after a normal pause in speech due to latency.

This interruption of normal conversation flow is more problematic to me than eye contact. We both know were speaking into machines after all.

[dheera]

For some reason video calls have just never worked well for me. Every single time it's either latency, massive amounts of echo making it hard to speak, and "can you hear me" every minute or two. For some reason, it's 2019 and we as a human race still haven't figured out how to get a stable 480p video stream over gigabits of bandwidth.

[shereadsthenews]

Video conferencing worked perfectly when it was still done over circuit-switched digital telco networks. It’s only the Internet that has botched things up.

[aidenn0]

If by "botched things up" you mean "Made affordable." Nobody other than Vint Cerf will argue that circuit-switched networks are not superior from a QoS point of view, but they can be orders of magnitude more expensive to build and maintain.

[closeparen]

They should be feasible to implement within a building, between buildings on the same street, and probably between geographically diverse sites of multi billion dollar companies that spend 30%+ of their labor hours on site-spanning meetings.

[shereadsthenews]

Yes you now have a choice: you can have terrible video meetings over Zoom or whatever, or you can get a T-1 and some Tandbergs and have good ones.

[mkj]

Maybe it's a good use for deepfake technology. Send the audio quickly (that works fine on a telephone, must be OK), then the receiver fakes up a talking head based on that.

[jacobush]

You'd be surprised - audio is very slow. Telephone works because we are trained to compensate and also because there are no visual cues. (Weird thing - the old analog lines were much faster than our cell phones of today.)

[C1sc0cat]

I can recall using the Hack to force international calls over cable instead of satellite (to reduce latency) when I used to do a lot of international liaison for BT.