How to Fix Video Conferencing
In the current pandemic, the world is relying on video conferencing to conduct all types of meetings. Yet it often feels less than completely satisfying, especially when meetings are between more than two people.
Even though video conferencing meeting technology has improved dramatically with tools like Zoom and Otter, two important things are missing: feedback and attention tracking. Let me explain.
Feedback: have you noticed that standup comedians never record their jokes in front of an empty video camera? That’s right, even Jerry Seinfeld or SNL need a room full of live audience for every taping. Why? The feedback from the live audience is crucial for even the best story tellers to learn and adjust in real time. Video conferencing makes it much more difficult than in a real meeting room to get that fresh feedback.
The fix: the short-term fix is to encourage the people you are meeting with to turn on their cameras so that you can see their faces and reactions. It works reasonably well with 1:1 meetings. It’s a bit more work to get a group of people to show their faces but it’s worth the effort.
Attention tracking: humans are very sensitive in tracking other people’s attention. You may have this same experience of sitting in a traffic light and turn to look at the next car, noticing the other driver is also turning back at you. When we meet, the other people’s attention is a big part of the body language. We spend quite a bit of our attention in tracking whether the other people are looking at us, at each other, or at something else that might be of importance. With video conferencing the body/head/eyes are all relative to the video camera which makes attention tracking completely off-mark.
The fix:There’s no easy short-term fix here. Technology can track the focus point of a user relative to the camera and make artificial corrections; but it doesn’t solve the core problem. VR glasses theoretically could recreate a digital meeting room with realistic 3D avatars but the equipment adoption and advanced rendering tech required are still years away. In the meantime, Zoom and others could add more visual cues to better convey real user attention. For average users, getting a better video camera aimed at eye-line height will go a long way of making your remote meetings a bit more productive.
