Sounds like you’re limiting your view to work-related calls. If I could have real eye contact on personal calls, it would make a huge difference. My current technique of looking just below the camera already makes a huge difference, and it’s only a hack to make it seem like eye contact for the other person.

I do half of that crap on personal calls too. Interestingly enough, I don't get those issues on phone calls! Or most audio only calls over the internet.

The underlying issue is the technical failures of video calling, not the social environment it's used in.

On laptop I would reduce the video window to 10% of screen and put it just under the camera and it made a huge difference

I've had decent luck tilting the laptop screen down a bit so that it reduces the distance between the camera and the window

You would have to look directly into the camera, no? Why just below?

I would guess because if you always looked directly into the camera, it would be harder to watch the video/see the other person at the same time.

It is natural to look at the person and eye contact when talking to them. Hence we don't look at the camera, though I'm sure some people can and do this.

> "Can you hear me? I can't hear you"

Would you mind explain me why there isn't anything (or only little) done in that area? I guess we could implement some assistive checks for input and output audio streams? What is blocking us to implement a "handshake" that will verify that all is fine? - let's say communicators will send a recorded sample "Hello World" message over wire and check the microphone, volume, noise etc. In my opinion the pattern how we resolve the "I can't hear you" problem is a repeatable checklist that we more or less confidently do, so why we can't implement it as some algorithm that takes care of those problems in automatic way?

because your microphone can't hear what's happening in your headphones, and your computer doesn't know if you're using headphones.

A system that has access to both the microphone and the headphones could coordinate both based on past experiences (e.g., learning). I don't know how much data you would need to make it reliable though. If you know how the data is going to be transmitted, and assume little network delays, recording yourself before a video session might be of great help. Probably the same problem that TV broadcasters have. It's hard work to get quality real time content.

> Above it are fixing the obligatory 5 minutes of "Can you hear me? I can't hear you" before the actual conversation starts.

Whenever I’m in this mode (which basically means whenever I’m on a conference call) I wonder what percentage of the GDP this represents, in aggregate.

Supposedly, way way less than the portion of the GDP that is made possible by remote work.

Those problems are solvable, the solutions are here.

And there are even more problems with consumer telepresence:

http://hellarddesign.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-living-room-vi...

But i feel that they too are solvable, if you care enough(like when you want to keep in touch with you senior parents).

Senior parents might not be as forthcoming as a project lead about the fact that the call quality sucks and that they can't hear half the things you say. Just a thought.

I spent the past 5+ years in jobs where I had to have multiple video calls per week. I used every tech imaginable, from those that cost five figures to the gratis ones. If these problems are solved, why is the experience universally terrible on all of them?

When I call my parents, it's over the plain old phone line, because I actually want to talk to them. Not seeing their faces on the screen is a small price to pay for not having each and every call turn into an impromptu debugging session.

I have the opposite problem. Call quality over cellular networks is always terrible. Even when you can hear each other, the quality is awful. I generally use voice over internet with something like signal.

I also find that Apple's FaceTime is the most consistently good and functional with little "can you hear me now".

I have the opposite problem. Call quality over cellular networks is always terrible. Even when you can hear each other, the quality is awful. I generally use voice over internet with something like signal.

What about a microphone array ?

Have you tried putting that both on your and your parents' locations ?

And what kind of internet you two are using ? and are the devices using wifi , or are wired ?

Sounds like you've only used shit systems on shit networks.