Eye contact & video calls
VR allows face-to-face communication, you have elements of gaze tracking, with the tradeoff of no facial expressions or realism
Video calls allow eye contact, but it's either artificial (software gaze correction) or faked (looking at camera instead of screen). This is quite a strange disconnect from reality.
Questions
- is eye contact actually important in face-to-face?
- does "face" contact work instead? Looking at forehead/nose/mouth?
- does the same hold true for people self conscious about some aspect of their face (worried about people staring at mole or scar)
- can you actually tell where someone is looking?
- are microsaccades detectable? Do we notice them?
- are women more used to the downward gaze of zoom calls?
- what about looking away in face-to-face conversations? Plenty of topics that are easier without eye contact
- it is not always about contact vs avoidant
- strangers vs people you know
- video calls have the other elements of uncertainty - alt tabbing, looking at another screen etc.
Links
- post on zoom gloom
- group calls, who/where to look?
- Study on response to eye contact
- compares face-to-face, video chat, and video recording and sees similar effect regardless of medium
- for self-assessment, is the word "arousal" a loaded term here?
- would we expect same results for non-Finnish people?
Topics
Gaze correction
- Intel concept
- only active when looking at screen (don't correct when looking away)
- "attention correction" (disconcerting name) made it into iOS13, had issues in some cases; wearing glasses caused artifacts
- would you actually want this? Introduces issue of faking attention. Though I guess this already exists in various RL interactions - from eye-contact avoidance things like "look at forehead"
- some bullshit paywalled study "debunking" the importance of eye contact from when researcher looked at mouth
- eye tracking studies seem hard when they depend on weird-looking glasses, though maybe people are fine with them I'd feel pretty self-conscious