For me, I also think the slight audio / video lag is really difficult in a similar way. It makes conversational fluency really hard, such as when you can interject, or knowing when someone has finished. It means that conversations tend to become a series of monologues, and that's a really tedious way of having a conversation.
For instance, when everyone is in the same room, you’re manifesting you dedicated your time to the meeting. From there, even if participants look at their mail or do something that might not be related, or just look bored, there is some leeway given by the fact they are there in the first place.
In most remote settings, I find this leeway is way thinner, and it is less accepted to be distracted by something else, people will be apologizing in more specific ways to justify they weren’t listenning.
or, point out "hey you have something else on screen because white screenlight flashed on your face"
Leaving this company in a month, although they're paying me 2x the local average SE salary here in Sweden.
But if you invite everyone to every meeting, have no agenda, and have awkward silences in the meeting you called while trying to come up with stuff to talk about... then surely people will try to get some work done in parallel.
Even if you have 5 people for 30 min on the call, it's totally understandable that one or two of them find it mildly boring but here and there relevant. For instance they are expert in one of the field touched by your project and they sometimes need to react.
In your ideal state, the choice is for them to leave the meeting altogether and find something else they can focus more on, or to focus 100% on the meeting and spend half of their time religiously listening to stuff they don't really need to hear.
In my experience the result of the second choice is people being more and more reticent to come to meetings, not just because of some hypothetical time lost, but because it's mentally painful.
As an added bonus, instead of having one meeting with 5 people, you need to make 3 with only the parts each members fully care about, and eventually a few more down the line when what they each say in isolation doesn't make sense when assembled together.
A well-prepared meeting is fast-paced and keeps everyone genuinely involved.
so you keep staring at your own image, which means everyone is staring at their own image, which means no one is looking at your image, which means you don’t need to care what you look like,
Maybe once video calls are routinely 1080p/2160p it will matter more, but 320p (the default for most systems today) at a low bitrate isn’t really doing much. You might as well shut it off unless you’re leading the meeting at that moment.
Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light.
I recently did a fair bit of research into this exact setup and landed on a Logitech StreamCam and a Elgato Key Light.
Well worth the money if you’re interested in achieving a high consumer grade level of quality, just be sure to purchase an adapter for the StreamCam as it is (infuriatingly) wired with a USB C connector.
There is no option for 1080, much less 2160.
I'm not sure if she was mistaken, or if there's some kind of eye tracking/image processing stuff going on to do this. FYI it was Microsoft Teams.
Easiest way to confirm this is not true, though (rather than just describe the challenge involved) - have a Zoom/Teams/whatever call 1-on-1. As you're talking to the person, and they're talking back to you, note where their eyes are. 95% of the time they're going to be below where your eyes would "meet", i.e., the camera is at the top of their monitor/laptop, and they're looking at you on screen. In fact, I've had some people -never- 'meet' my gaze, because they never become self-aware enough to "oh, I should look at my camera when I am talking".
I'm not sure that looking into the camera is that important in a one-to-one setting. I'm specifically not talking about a "broadcast", like when you address an assembly and the communication is expected to go both ways.
To me, the reason why we look at a person when talking together is to see their reactions, and for them to see ours. Even in real life, and in particular when we speak, we don't look at the other person's eyes 100% of the time.
So in the case of video chat, where the "eyes" (the camera) is completely separate from the face, looking into the eyes cuts you off from their reaction, as you'll only see it in your peripheral vision. However, even if you see their eyes never meet yours, you're able to infer whether they're looking at your video or reading something else. And the most important part, their reactions, is still there.
To me, the whole point of video chat, as opposed to a phone call, is to have this additional channel of communication. If you're not looking at the person with whom you're talking, you might as well not use video at all.
If I was planning to do any interviews I would definitely build and use this.
It also makes me wonder, when people are staring into the camera if they are looking at a photo instead of the camera lens.
I'm not a really outgoing person but when I talk in real life I'm one of those people who tend to look into someone's eyes a lot when talking and listening, probably 97% eye contact from my end if I had to guess. It feels very weird not to do this but looking into the webcam is much worse for me because you can't see the other person at the same time.
I haven't figured out why I prefer eye contact, but I wonder if it has to do with being able to see what the other person is doing and how they're reacting to the conversation. You can pick up a lot of information when looking at someone's face.
Making the window small enough to not generate much eye movement when scrolling around is a refinement.
There’s also a video where someone shows how your eyes get distorted to cause the effect, but I can’t find it right now.
And poor her - big Teams meeting are actually awful and large meeting with it are not good.
A lot of my team members were in Australia which appears to have dismal internet, a terrible connection to New Zealand, or both.
I work off a desktop with two 28" monitors and my camera sits above them in the center, and the meeting has to be on the left monitor or the right monitor, not straddling the middle, so you will never get that feeling of me looking directly at you.
I am, however, thinking of making something that deepfakes the perspective change correctly.
I have two different setups, one with a laptop that has an external monitor; one that is my tower with two monitors. On both, the camera is basically over the monitor I use for video conferencing. I don't care if somebody notices me staring at the other monitor - it's no worse than staring at the desk during a face-to-face meeting while somebody else is talking.
Or you could, you know, move the camera. I keep mine centered on top of my main monitor.
Real-world group conversations are not like that at all. If you're tired or you have nothing to say, you can just be in a corner listening to other people speak, nobody will mind, and you don't feel observed. That's a lot more like when you have your camera off.