How to Look People in the Eye While VideoconferencingBy David Schneider. 24 Jul 2020 | 19:00 GMT
Many of us are spending more time videoconferencing than we’ve ever done before. And that situation probably won’t be changing anytime soon.
One thing that’s become painfully obvious to me during the past few months is that some people are more conscientious than others about how they present themselves. The worst offenders position themselves in front of a window, forcing others to view them in silhouette and making me wonder whether I’m in a business meeting or watching “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
I try to avoid such obvious videoconferencing faux pas. But there’s one fundamental awkwardness that no amount of strategic laptop positioning can solve: not being able to make eye contact with other participants because they, like me, are looking at their screens rather than their Web cameras. Everyone appears to be casting their gaze downward, as if bored or perhaps telling a lie. It’s nearly impossible to avoid that annoying tendency—not without some drastic action.
The action in my case was to construct something I’d seen featured on Hackaday, a gizmo designed by a video blogger that makes clever use of a semitransparent mirror—basically the same strategy used for teleprompters but at a fraction of the cost and with materials I could easily scavenge or order. With such a mirror, you can view the screen straight on while also looking directly at an external webcam. This contraption, which I’ve taken to calling my Zoom Box, allows me to look other people right in the eye while in a Zoom or Webex meeting with them.
Awesome bit of geekery. A must-have device for anyone that regularly uses video conferencing.
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