I telecommuted for years and almost never used a webcam. A shared desktop has way more potential for something really interesting and valuable being displayed.
Watching hoards of people hop on webcams to transmit choppy video information about their face and home seems like wasted bandwidth to me.
Edit: addendum, get a headset, transmitting voice clearly with some decent noise cancellation is really important. I buy the cheap logitech h390, like 25 bucks each.
Been remote for ~6 years now. I've used my camera maybe a dozen times, tops, during that time.
+1 for investing in a good headset. Get something that completely covers the ears, and/or has some noise cancelling. I bought a Logitech gaming headset with a good mic and it's made a BIG difference, esp. on days where I'm on 4+ hours for calls.
Having done both for a long period of time, having the “face time” really makes a big difference for communication type meetings. However, it’s not as useful for instructional or co-working type meetings where you really only care about the screen sharing.
Getting a headset is important, but it doesn't help with latency. That huge amounts of latency are somehow considered acceptable in these communication channels drives me mad.
People are getting really excited about the future of WFH, but oh my god will it be awful for those with managers who need to see your butt is in your seat when at the office. Why should we expect this to change when the home becomes the office? Daily stand ups are now on zoom!
One of the nice things about it is that you can also filter the output on your end - so if you're in a meeting with someone who is sitting outside near a busy road, or they have a roommate who is gaming on a mechanical keyboard, you can filter the noise out without missing something if that person decides to speak up.
You would think this sort of functionality would be implemented in sound cards but I can't think of any significant advancement in audio processing in years.
If the theory is correct, Zoom fatigue exists because videoconferencing is a worse experience than in-person conversations. Media quality, latency, the inability to use most of our motor/sensory apparatus, all contribute to micro-frustrations which accumulate over the course of a meeting.
On the other hand, screen sharing with interactive control when working together on a shared task is actually better than sitting next to someone on their computer. In person, I can only talk and point at their screen. With interactive screen sharing, I can click, type, and even draw live on their screen.
I spend hours a day in interactive screen share sessions (quasi-pair programming but not really) and never feel the effects of Zoom fatigue. But when I have to use a product without the ability to easily draw or interact, or have a meeting where it’s just about faces in boxes, I immediately feel extra “drag”.
I’m curious to hear if anyone else has had the same experience.
If this is correct, there may be a way to sidestep the issues of Zoom fatigue with better tools and processes (e.g. don’t talk about work, instead do the work together).
> the inability to use most of our motor/sensory apparatus, all contribute to micro-frustrations which accumulate over the course of a meeting.
I wonder if VR or AR would help with this. If your stand-up was in a VR room then you could look people in the eye, and maybe even move around or gesture with your hands. Wouldn't it be ironic if something mundane like remote work turned out to be the killer Virtual Reality app.
This is an interesting comparison. I'm using uBlock Origin so I'm not sure how the ads compare. Layout-wise, theconversation.com is a little more narrow, and the links are not as highlighted. But the non-black font is a deal-breaker for me. (I'm sure there's an extension, but I find myself doing Inspect -> Uncheck Font Color a lot!) The only other difference is that PopSci.com seems to have less clutter in the columns, so for me, it's the better reading experience (before I give up and toggle reader view!)
>The solution to Zoom fatigue is to eliminate meetings where the purpose is to share basic facts & information.
Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems.
Just an fyi to avoid derailing the topic...
The "fatigue" the author is talking about is not about frequency of useless and redundant meetings.
Her usage of "fatigue" is specifically talking about bad sound quality and some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.
Whether everybody in the press uses "zoom fatigue" the same way I can't say. In any case, it's the fatigue from suboptimal sound environments is how the author of this thread's article is using it.
As someone who has worked with remote teams for years and has spent many, many hours in Zooms and the like, my advice is to get used to it because it's great.
I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking.
What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?
> What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?
There's a huge difference! You can move around in-person without making sure you're "in frame", subtle body language isn't lost to the shitty framerates and compression of most webcams, speech doesn't get messed up from packet loss or shoddy echo cancellation code, and you are in a shared environment which makes it easier to communicate without having to STARE at the other person/camera the entire time you're talking to them.
For me seeing people on webcam is a totally different experience than from seeing them in person. I don’t get any of the signals I get from being in the same room so for me it’s basically useless and even distracting.
I think with some image computation it should be possible to give a much better video conferencing experience. Add better backgrounds and maybe have several cameras and compute a more 3D image vs the weird angles we see now.
> What's the difference between a camera and being in person?
That's your 'matter of taste'; for me it's 'what's the difference between text chat and voice chat' (actually, I find text chat far more efficient than voice chat). I know many people who won't turn on their camera while they are not shy in public and you know many people who like voice better over text, so I guess that's just what you like or don't like?
Most people brush their hair, put on make up, or wear nice clothes, when they go out. I've seen some people online after a few weeks and some people look quite different at the moment. Some people are embarassed. Some don't care. Some joke that they had to put on a shirt.
All of these video fatigue articles ignore the eye contact problem. From a paper I wrote on mediating over video:
The most important element of body language is eye contact. “Gaze is vital in the flow of natural communication, monitoring of feedback, regulating turn taking, and punctuating emotion. The lack of eye contact shows timidity, embarrassment, shyness, uncertainty and social awkwardness. (Edelmann and Hampson [1]).” Having a camera on top of a monitor creates the appearance that participants are looking down. If you do look up into the camera, you aren’t looking at the other participant’s faces! Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.
It is a hard problem to solve. I set up a studio in my office where I have a second monitor and external camera back far enough away so it works. I have looked for solutions and they are generally inaccessible. Room sized immersive systems from Cisco, etc solve it, but they are too expensive for the plebs. I have seen some goofy hacks using see through mirrors and video prompters. There are some productized versions of that but they all seemed to fail. The latest apple phones use ARKit to solve it by manipulating your video, but I have only read about it as a beta feature for facetime.
There is probably some money to be made here, but the gating factor is general awareness of this gaping hole...
What's the evidence for this? I believe there is a psychological effect that people report more malaise when you ask them about it. Back when I first studied psychology I self-diagnosed myself with like 5 different mental defects. Confirmation bias and hypochondriasis?
Consider that as audio quality gets worse and worse eventually becoming indecipherable (from latency, dropouts, distortion...), it takes increasing effort to understand what is being said. The curve is non-linear, but the direction of the correlation is clear.
There is no question that auditory fatigue is real. The question is only to what extent poor audio is a contributing factor to "Zoom Fatigue".
There are a bunch of articles about it. National Geographic [1], Harvard Business Review [2], BB [3]. One of the theories is that we have to work harder to pick up on non-verbal cues, which consumes energy.
A data point from the BBC article: "One 2014 study by German academics showed that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively: even delays of 1.2 seconds made people perceive the responder as less friendly or focused."
My team is spread throughout the US and for a few years now my professional life was wall to wall Google Hangouts/Meet. It's been largely business as usual for us.
I wouldn't say there aren't other factors. General anxiety about ones health and paycheck, parents are now largely unpaid teachers, 24/7 news coverage of generally bad news.
It probably all adds up and we just blame it on technology. 5g towers, video games and now Zoom.
No. Like I mentioned elsewhere here, almost everyone I know hates it and I myself hate it as well, while I am a social monster (put me somewhere and i'm chatting to everyone in no time flat).
I wouldn't say I hate it, but I would say I find it tiring.
One of the great things about regular phone calls is you can multitask. Walk around the house and straighten up papers, load some dirty dishes in the dishwasher, etc. With video, it feels more like a performance.
I don't really get the point of keeping video open. I'm always either looking at emails, a shared desktop, an issue tracker, or some kind of document while we are on calls. Seeing people sip coffee and pick their nose doesn't really add anything except bandwidth.
From my experience: get headsets for people, they are cheap. Get dual monitor setups and foster culture of active screen sharing - that’s very powerful thing.
Picture quality tends to be so bad that there’s not many non-verbal cues transmitted. Video may cause fatigue - you feel the need look smart. When video is off you can lean back, stand, walk circles, draw things, stare out..
Check PulseEffects, it has an UI that allows to enable and configure effects for both input and output. Last I checked, it is on the default repository of many distros.
Your computer mic will be biased towards vocal range frequencies anyway. Components of the voice that are unpleasant are in the upper mid range around 3-4k i think. For smoother voices what you really want is specialised compression to get rid of sibilance (hissy s sound) and plosives (low frequency large air movement caused by b, d, p sounds) from listening to a lot of voice calls recently though I think most machines do quite a lot of this automatically. The key here thou is don't get too close to the mic as it exaggerates these effects.
Not a linux user, but a decent external mic or headset is going to make the most difference here, its largely a factor of the tiny internal mics in laptops. They will also do better with sound insulation, internal are not well insulated from the fan, keyboard etc.
pulseeffects is a pretty neat tool for both playback and record effects including a compressor, gater, equalizer, filters, de-sser (can help quite a lot in reducing those sharp S sounds) and more. It has made a lot of presentations a lot more bearable for me, and my relatively low quality microphone in a noisy environment sound a lot better for others.
It only requires pulseaudio (almost all distro's already use it) and is available in most package repositories and as a flatpak.
[+] [-] replyifuagree|5 years ago|reply
Watching hoards of people hop on webcams to transmit choppy video information about their face and home seems like wasted bandwidth to me.
Edit: addendum, get a headset, transmitting voice clearly with some decent noise cancellation is really important. I buy the cheap logitech h390, like 25 bucks each.
[+] [-] blaser-waffle|5 years ago|reply
+1 for investing in a good headset. Get something that completely covers the ears, and/or has some noise cancelling. I bought a Logitech gaming headset with a good mic and it's made a BIG difference, esp. on days where I'm on 4+ hours for calls.
[+] [-] orev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rectang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalgearsolid3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bentcorner|5 years ago|reply
It works for non-RTX cards as well with some tweaking (https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1670164). Works marvelously for removing background noise - mic hum, typing, cars driving by.
One of the nice things about it is that you can also filter the output on your end - so if you're in a meeting with someone who is sitting outside near a busy road, or they have a roommate who is gaming on a mechanical keyboard, you can filter the noise out without missing something if that person decides to speak up.
[+] [-] Vinnl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] machbio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Junk_Collector|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketamine__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthscienceman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsherwani|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand, screen sharing with interactive control when working together on a shared task is actually better than sitting next to someone on their computer. In person, I can only talk and point at their screen. With interactive screen sharing, I can click, type, and even draw live on their screen.
I spend hours a day in interactive screen share sessions (quasi-pair programming but not really) and never feel the effects of Zoom fatigue. But when I have to use a product without the ability to easily draw or interact, or have a meeting where it’s just about faces in boxes, I immediately feel extra “drag”.
I’m curious to hear if anyone else has had the same experience.
If this is correct, there may be a way to sidestep the issues of Zoom fatigue with better tools and processes (e.g. don’t talk about work, instead do the work together).
[+] [-] Corrado|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if VR or AR would help with this. If your stand-up was in a VR room then you could look people in the eye, and maybe even move around or gesture with your hands. Wouldn't it be ironic if something mundane like remote work turned out to be the killer Virtual Reality app.
[+] [-] extra88|5 years ago|reply
https://theconversation.com/zoom-fatigue-how-to-make-video-c...
[+] [-] neogodless|5 years ago|reply
EDIT: There is (at least one!)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blacken/
[+] [-] lukethomas|5 years ago|reply
Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems.
[+] [-] jasode|5 years ago|reply
Just an fyi to avoid derailing the topic...
The "fatigue" the author is talking about is not about frequency of useless and redundant meetings.
Her usage of "fatigue" is specifically talking about bad sound quality and some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.
Whether everybody in the press uses "zoom fatigue" the same way I can't say. In any case, it's the fatigue from suboptimal sound environments is how the author of this thread's article is using it.
[+] [-] dhimes|5 years ago|reply
And if the siblings are right, and the OP is using the term to speak only of fatigue due to bad audio then OP has misappropriated the term.
I'll link the vid in my profile if anyone cares.
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
I used to dread conference calls. I can't stand listening to a room where I can't see faces. I never know what people are thinking.
What I really can't understand is the people who hate turning on their cameras yet will greet me with a smile and a handshake in person. What's the difference between a camera and being in person?
[+] [-] bschwindHN|5 years ago|reply
There's a huge difference! You can move around in-person without making sure you're "in frame", subtle body language isn't lost to the shitty framerates and compression of most webcams, speech doesn't get messed up from packet loss or shoddy echo cancellation code, and you are in a shared environment which makes it easier to communicate without having to STARE at the other person/camera the entire time you're talking to them.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|5 years ago|reply
I think with some image computation it should be possible to give a much better video conferencing experience. Add better backgrounds and maybe have several cameras and compute a more 3D image vs the weird angles we see now.
[+] [-] tluyben2|5 years ago|reply
That's your 'matter of taste'; for me it's 'what's the difference between text chat and voice chat' (actually, I find text chat far more efficient than voice chat). I know many people who won't turn on their camera while they are not shy in public and you know many people who like voice better over text, so I guess that's just what you like or don't like?
[+] [-] lizknope|5 years ago|reply
No video? Then they don't have to worry.
[+] [-] posedge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|5 years ago|reply
You can make eye contact.
[+] [-] wintermutestwin|5 years ago|reply
The most important element of body language is eye contact. “Gaze is vital in the flow of natural communication, monitoring of feedback, regulating turn taking, and punctuating emotion. The lack of eye contact shows timidity, embarrassment, shyness, uncertainty and social awkwardness. (Edelmann and Hampson [1]).” Having a camera on top of a monitor creates the appearance that participants are looking down. If you do look up into the camera, you aren’t looking at the other participant’s faces! Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.
It is a hard problem to solve. I set up a studio in my office where I have a second monitor and external camera back far enough away so it works. I have looked for solutions and they are generally inaccessible. Room sized immersive systems from Cisco, etc solve it, but they are too expensive for the plebs. I have seen some goofy hacks using see through mirrors and video prompters. There are some productized versions of that but they all seemed to fail. The latest apple phones use ARKit to solve it by manipulating your video, but I have only read about it as a beta feature for facetime.
There is probably some money to be made here, but the gating factor is general awareness of this gaping hole...
[+] [-] saurik|5 years ago|reply
How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up below my monitor.)
[+] [-] longtom|5 years ago|reply
What's the evidence for this? I believe there is a psychological effect that people report more malaise when you ask them about it. Back when I first studied psychology I self-diagnosed myself with like 5 different mental defects. Confirmation bias and hypochondriasis?
[+] [-] rectang|5 years ago|reply
There is no question that auditory fatigue is real. The question is only to what extent poor audio is a contributing factor to "Zoom Fatigue".
[+] [-] take_a_breath|5 years ago|reply
A data point from the BBC article: "One 2014 study by German academics showed that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively: even delays of 1.2 seconds made people perceive the responder as less friendly or focused."
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavir...
[2] https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-combat-zoom-fatigue
[3] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video...
[+] [-] nameistaken|5 years ago|reply
My team is spread throughout the US and for a few years now my professional life was wall to wall Google Hangouts/Meet. It's been largely business as usual for us.
I wouldn't say there aren't other factors. General anxiety about ones health and paycheck, parents are now largely unpaid teachers, 24/7 news coverage of generally bad news.
It probably all adds up and we just blame it on technology. 5g towers, video games and now Zoom.
[+] [-] _salmon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseidl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tluyben2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmonk|5 years ago|reply
One of the great things about regular phone calls is you can multitask. Walk around the house and straighten up papers, load some dirty dishes in the dishwasher, etc. With video, it feels more like a performance.
[+] [-] thrower123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gherkinnn|5 years ago|reply
Fascinating how an entirely new culture and vocabulary sprung up in no time.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|5 years ago|reply
Picture quality tends to be so bad that there’s not many non-verbal cues transmitted. Video may cause fatigue - you feel the need look smart. When video is off you can lean back, stand, walk circles, draw things, stare out..
[+] [-] Mattasher|5 years ago|reply
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/3-is-latency-killing-o...
[+] [-] rectang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179607
[+] [-] avaer|5 years ago|reply
For all of the problems with VR/spatial meetings, boredom is not one, and Hubs makes for a pretty good Powerpoint with fidget spinners.
It requires the office buy into gaming/avatar culture (which I realize is a tall order) but it works for us.
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|5 years ago|reply
Any tools on linux that can do this?
[+] [-] c0ffe|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects
[+] [-] jonnypotty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lincolnbryant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfsys|5 years ago|reply
It only requires pulseaudio (almost all distro's already use it) and is available in most package repositories and as a flatpak.
https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects
[+] [-] skapadia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryuukk_|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]