Watching hoards of people hop on webcams to transmit choppy video information about their face and home seems like wasted bandwidth to me.

Edit: addendum, get a headset, transmitting voice clearly with some decent noise cancellation is really important. I buy the cheap logitech h390, like 25 bucks each.

It works for non-RTX cards as well with some tweaking (https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1670164). Works marvelously for removing background noise - mic hum, typing, cars driving by.

One of the nice things about it is that you can also filter the output on your end - so if you're in a meeting with someone who is sitting outside near a busy road, or they have a roommate who is gaming on a mechanical keyboard, you can filter the noise out without missing something if that person decides to speak up.

On the other hand, screen sharing with interactive control when working together on a shared task is actually better than sitting next to someone on their computer. In person, I can only talk and point at their screen. With interactive screen sharing, I can click, type, and even draw live on their screen.

I spend hours a day in interactive screen share sessions (quasi-pair programming but not really) and never feel the effects of Zoom fatigue. But when I have to use a product without the ability to easily draw or interact, or have a meeting where it’s just about faces in boxes, I immediately feel extra “drag”.

I’m curious to hear if anyone else has had the same experience.

If this is correct, there may be a way to sidestep the issues of Zoom fatigue with better tools and processes (e.g. don’t talk about work, instead do the work together).

https://theconversation.com/zoom-fatigue-how-to-make-video-c...

Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems.

I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking.

What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?

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...

What's the evidence for this? I believe there is a psychological effect that people report more malaise when you ask them about it. Back when I first studied psychology I self-diagnosed myself with like 5 different mental defects. Confirmation bias and hypochondriasis?

Fascinating how an entirely new culture and vocabulary sprung up in no time.

Picture quality tends to be so bad that there’s not many non-verbal cues transmitted. Video may cause fatigue - you feel the need look smart. When video is off you can lean back, stand, walk circles, draw things, stare out..

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/3-is-latency-killing-o...

For all of the problems with VR/spatial meetings, boredom is not one, and Hubs makes for a pretty good Powerpoint with fidget spinners.

It requires the office buy into gaming/avatar culture (which I realize is a tall order) but it works for us.

Any tools on linux that can do this?

There's a huge difference! You can move around in-person without making sure you're "in frame", subtle body language isn't lost to the shitty framerates and compression of most webcams, speech doesn't get messed up from packet loss or shoddy echo cancellation code, and you are in a shared environment which makes it easier to communicate without having to STARE at the other person/camera the entire time you're talking to them.

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.

That's your 'matter of taste'; for me it's 'what's the difference between text chat and voice chat' (actually, I find text chat far more efficient than voice chat). I know many people who won't turn on their camera while they are not shy in public and you know many people who like voice better over text, so I guess that's just what you like or don't like?

No video? Then they don't have to worry.

You can make eye contact.