Eye contact

A weird thing about Skype, Zoom, and similar video chat tools is that they don’t support eye contact for a call with more than two people. So there is a fundamental difference between talking one-on-one and any other remote conversation.

In real life, we use our eye gaze, face, body, hands and other nonverbal cues to let everyone know to whom we are directing our attention. We are very good at this. Sometimes we can send very complex nonverbal messages about how we are directing our attention, in different ways, to multiple people at once.

But in video chat we have none of those powers at our disposal. We are just looking into a camera lens, no matter who we are talking to.

I suspect that one of the next big innovations in video chat will be a good way to solve this problem. Given that we are, for now, pretty much all stuck working remotely, it seems like a very worthwhile problem to work on.

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