[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.