PSA: “Gaze Distraction” is a fascinating research rabbit hole to go down. It is the primary reason video calling feels inauthentic. Solving it is extraordinarily difficult.
In real life convos we look at each other’s eyes. That eye contact creates trust and a lack of it creates anxiety in most people.
In video calls because you are looking at a video of other participants, and that video is (usually) below the camera, it creates low level anxiety when interacting.
Gaze distraction is imho the primary reason many people have been averse to video calling since it was first invented.
Gaze distraction is also the reason that you may feel more tired after a video call than an in person meeting.
At iCall we almost solved it in 2009 by auto hiding your own video and flashing imperceptible white dots every 1/30th of a second at the very top middle of the screen.
We spent 6 months solving a problem that nobody knew they had, but we saw a massive uptick in post call CSAT when it was enabled.
It was just enough that the watcher couldn’t see it but it pulled the pupils up enough that gaze distraction was reduced.
The only perfect solution to gaze distraction is embedding the camera IN THE SCREEN so that the user is looking directly at the camera when looking at other participants
Apple, Microsoft, and many others have patented some flavor of the camera inside the screen... but for obvious reasons that is very challenging to do.
The other reason video calling feels inauthentic is that the audio codecs used by most video calling (g711 or g729) are left overs from POTS.
To this day most phones still use g711. These codecs are why you sometimes have to clarify whether you said B or D... or S or F when spelling things on phone calls.
Because most commercial video call solutions have to support dial in participants, they drop everybody’s audio quality to match the codec tha the dial in users will use.
Not all video calling systems do this, some employ a down sampling at the server level for particular ants who are on phones, but this is more compute power and becomes more expensive for the provider to do.
At iCall we solved this by doing exactly that and by implementing Opus for the audio for all computer participants. The quality was stunning, CD quality. Opus was the Betamax of audio codecs. I still don’t understand why it didn’t take off more.
So now you know (cc: @stevesi) why video calls are exhausting.
And autocorrect still ducks.
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