[wintermutestwin]

All of these video fatigue articles ignore the eye contact problem. From a paper I wrote on mediating over video:

The most important element of body language is eye contact. “Gaze is vital in the flow of natural communication, monitoring of feedback, regulating turn taking, and punctuating emotion. The lack of eye contact shows timidity, embarrassment, shyness, uncertainty and social awkwardness. (Edelmann and Hampson [1]).” Having a camera on top of a monitor creates the appearance that participants are looking down. If you do look up into the camera, you aren’t looking at the other participant’s faces! Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.

It is a hard problem to solve. I set up a studio in my office where I have a second monitor and external camera back far enough away so it works. I have looked for solutions and they are generally inaccessible. Room sized immersive systems from Cisco, etc solve it, but they are too expensive for the plebs. I have seen some goofy hacks using see through mirrors and video prompters. There are some productized versions of that but they all seemed to fail. The latest apple phones use ARKit to solve it by manipulating your video, but I have only read about it as a beta feature for facetime.

There is probably some money to be made here, but the gating factor is general awareness of this gaping hole...

[saurik]

> Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.

How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up below my monitor.)

[wintermutestwin]

Common wisdom is that you want your camera to be just above eye level slightly looking down on you. The camera pointed up at your face is "unflattering."

[saurik]

I am 6'4" tall and so everyone is extremely used to looking up at me and it even can feel very strange seeing a camera looking down at me ;P. But I am more asking about stuff like "there is research which shows that if you are looking down you look like you are hiding something but if you look up it looks like you are arrogant or distracted or [fill in the blank]", not "is this a flattering camera angle" ;P.