[asjw]

There are things that technology can't replace

Like talking to a room where people are actually present and to 20 people each from their laptop, with the mic muted and the video turned off

It's much harder to 'read the room' and much is lost

And I certainly love working from home and don't fancy socializing much when at work

But technology made a lot of work-related things harder or worse

[feanaro]

I appreciate what you're saying and I agree that it's very hard, but I think it may be too quick to chalk it up as being impossible.

In fact, things like making the room easier to read despite using a camera is exactly what I was talking about. It is definitely the case with today's systems where you simply have a camera on the lid of the laptop and display many individual images of people on the screen. This does look very unnatural.

For instance, one very distracting aspect of this is that it is impossible for two people to be looking into each other's eyes as they are communicating, since the image and the camera are not aligned. Solving this would at least make addressing a single person over a video call much more natural. Perhaps we could somehow place a camera behind the screen? Will volumetric display technology make it easier once it is more widespread?

And this is just one problem that we can identify. I'm sure there are many other subtle cues missing from a video call which could be identified and then hopefully fixed.