[tootie]

As someone who has worked with remote teams for years and has spent many, many hours in Zooms and the like, my advice is to get used to it because it's great.

I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking.

What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?

[bschwindHN]

> What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?

There's a huge difference! You can move around in-person without making sure you're "in frame", subtle body language isn't lost to the shitty framerates and compression of most webcams, speech doesn't get messed up from packet loss or shoddy echo cancellation code, and you are in a shared environment which makes it easier to communicate without having to STARE at the other person/camera the entire time you're talking to them.

[Ididntdothis]

For me seeing people on webcam is a totally different experience than from seeing them in person. I don’t get any of the signals I get from being in the same room so for me it’s basically useless and even distracting.

I think with some image computation it should be possible to give a much better video conferencing experience. Add better backgrounds and maybe have several cameras and compute a more 3D image vs the weird angles we see now.

[tootie]

Yeah, I was talking about this with a friend recently. I think that straight video conferencing is now pretty commoditized and cheap to execute. Facetime, Meet, Duo, Teams, Zoom are fairly undifferentiated. And you see products like Slack just drop video calling in without a lot of fanfare. I think there's going to be another generation on very near horizon where we see video software that is much more fit to purpose. One-on-one calls is not the same use case and business meetings, presentations, fitness classes, classroom situations. Streaming video and audio is easy, but there is a lot of room in the user experience and modes of interaction to build more useful products than just turning on a camera and microphone. Solving things like "eye contact" or the equivalent could be done. And we definitely shouldn't stop at just trying to model in-person interaction and really look at what the medium allows that wasn't possible before.

[Ididntdothis]

“Solving things like "eye contact" or the equivalent could be done.“

I bet if you had several cameras you could compute a video feed where people have direct eye contact instead of seeing them staring at a screen during a conversation

[tootie]

You can track gaze with just a single web cam with something like webgazer.js although it's not super precise. There are companies like Tobii that make dedicated gaze tracking sensors in multiple form factors. The trick is figuring out what to do with that information.

[tluyben2]

> What's the difference between a camera and being in person?

That's your 'matter of taste'; for me it's 'what's the difference between text chat and voice chat' (actually, I find text chat far more efficient than voice chat). I know many people who won't turn on their camera while they are not shy in public and you know many people who like voice better over text, so I guess that's just what you like or don't like?

[lizknope]

Most people brush their hair, put on make up, or wear nice clothes, when they go out. I've seen some people online after a few weeks and some people look quite different at the moment. Some people are embarassed. Some don't care. Some joke that they had to put on a shirt.

No video? Then they don't have to worry.

[posedge]

Adding to the points of others, you also feel "watched". In a real meeting, it doesn't feel like there is a spotlight on your face the whole time.

[ginko]

>What's the difference between a camera and being in person?

You can make eye contact.

[wintermutestwin]

That's a great point. I think a lot of this "fatigue" is due to the huge eye contact problem most video setups have. I have solved it by having a secondary monitor and camera placed far enough back, but your typical laptop camera user can't do this...