[wintermutestwin]

From a paper I wrote on the downsides of using video for mediation:

"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, as the vast majority of video endpoints and laptops have, 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. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest. Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Of all the problems with using videoconferencing for mediation, eye contact is the real show stopper. Again, corporate room-based systems mitigate this with multiple special cameras and other technological tricks. There are some solutions in the pipeline but they will take a long time to “trickle down to the masses.”

The solution I have settled on is to have a webcam on top of an external monitor set up far enough away that you can't really tell that I am not looking directly at the lens. It would be so much better if Zoom allowed me to rearrange the video panels. My perfect video conferencing app for mediation would allow rearrangement of each video stream and have a simpler breakout room functionality.

[KallDrexx]

That's interesting. If having a monitor above the monitor makes it seem like you are gazing down (timid) then is there anything about having the webcam near the bottom of the monitor (nose cam in dells or just putting a webcam below it on the desk)?