[HN Gopher] Why Do Virtual Meetings Feel So Weird?
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Why Do Virtual Meetings Feel So Weird?
Author : anthrocurious
Score : 26 points
Date : 2020-10-24 04:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sapiens.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sapiens.org)
| slykar wrote:
| The image I get from this article is that their work is very
| unorganized? They complain about issued with discussing stuff
| online, yet they don't use video?
|
| > Engineers who worked remotely with the engineers in the U.S.
| said, "We miss the hallway stuff." Andrei told me that when he
| spent time in Houston, he was able to build a mental map of "who
| knows what." When he got back to Romania, the map got out of date
| quickly.
|
| How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this? What if
| someone leaves the company. Whay if you have someone new? Why
| would every person need to build this map. Create it once, share
| it with everyone, make it accessible and editable.
|
| IMO online work often magnifies the issues that are already
| there.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's uncomfortable to write down that "Abel is here primarily
| because he's good friends with the CTO but he mostly stays out
| of the way, Baker is the one who really knows what's going on
| but can't write reliable code, and Charlie is a code monster
| but doesn't have the faintest idea of nor interest in how our
| business actually works."
|
| Pick your combinations of what pros and cons each team member
| brings, but it's rare for the unvarnished truth about your
| people map to be exclusively positive.
| bsder wrote:
| > How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this?
|
| By talking to people on a regular basis?
|
| This problem isn't new and even affects open source. Which
| people in the Linux kernel are experts on which USB drivers?
| You can look at commits, but that doesn't always reflect the
| reality on the ground of the people with the actual
| understanding of the detailed bits of the hardware. Unless you
| sit on the mailing list and chat server for a couple weeks, you
| won't figure this out.
|
| Big companies used to have this problem all the time back
| before ubiquitous communication. Some group would need
| knowledge about Subject A. They would appoint Person B in the
| group to be the liaison with Expert C who was in some other
| division--they would have to talk on the phone, fly to the the
| other division, etc. to maintain that knowledge Over time,
| Person B would become the "local" expert and would probably
| become a global expert as well. How would you find out who the
| experts are and where they are? You would tap your network and
| start walking it.
|
| Humans network--that's just how they are.
| swiley wrote:
| Virtual meetings are fine, here's what you might need:
|
| Mute yourself when you're not talking.
|
| Use a client with decent dynamic range compression (discord gets
| this right, some others don't)
|
| Video adds nothing.
| ddingus wrote:
| ...unless it does!
|
| I agree with your other points. One could run a compressor on
| an audio output easily enough. I have considered it.
|
| Video matters when there is show and tell. In a manufacturing
| sense, having video makes for a 5x meeting.
|
| People can consult drawings, identify features, express intent
| and query others about a part that is only rivaled by an actual
| conference room.
|
| Now I will say skilled people can use audio and drawings to get
| it done. I can, but it takes many years to build that skill.
|
| Add video and people developing their own can contribute and
| absorb that ongoing skill much better and that is good for
| everyone.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think the lack of eye contact is a big problem, possibly the
| biggest. Right now, when you look at the camera, the other person
| sees you looking them in the eyes. And when you look them in the
| eyes, they see you looking somewhere else. And when you move
| around, the other person's gaze doesn't track your position in
| space. The body language dimension of communication gets all
| messed up.
|
| Here's an example of tech that could fix this, using gaze
| tracking and 3D reconstruction to make the screen behave as a
| stable "artificial window" from your room into the other person's
| room, changing the view as you move your head. That way you can
| look at the other person and make eye contact naturally:
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90498000/move-over-zoom-this-mag...
| dang wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. It's the biggest problem that I
| experience, and certainly the lowest-hanging fruit for a
| technical solution. Surely the current vendors know this and
| are working on it? Is there something that makes it harder than
| it seems?
| kace91 wrote:
| Wouldn't under-display cameras be a better solution?
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's the latency. Getting a turn to speak becomes very difficult
| if the speaker doesn't provide a reasonable gap to break in to
| the conversation. You basically just need to push harder on the
| interruption than they push on continuing to speak. I know it
| sounds rude, but sometimes you need clarification if you want to
| have a chance at understanding what the speaker wants to say
| next. Sometimes you spot a flaw in what they've said and need to
| interject before they waste 10 minutes talking about something
| that's not going to work. And sometimes you just need to cut
| someone off to stop them from rambling and repeating the same
| thing in 5 different ways.
|
| While there are non-verbal cues that indicate that you have
| something to say, my experience with physical meetings is that
| those cues get completely overlooked anyway.
| [deleted]
| x87678r wrote:
| If you're running a meeting its great to be able to mute someone
| though. Would be nice to do that in real life. :)
| stanrivers wrote:
| Pluses and minuses for sure... I feel like the video meetings are
| always filled with people only 70% there... sure, you can glance
| at your phone every once in a while you are in a meeting... but
| you aren't making food, writing an email for a completely
| different topic or watching Youtube videos on a different screen.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's enabled people to do what they'd like to do all along,
| something else besides be in a meeting.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| That factor has made a fair amount of my meetings better.
| Meetings that really only needed 2 or 3 people, but 12 end up
| getting invited. All the extra meeting passengers no longer
| feel as though they have to appear engaged, so the
| conversation takes place between the people who actually
| needed to talk, everybody else zones out and pipes up with a
| quick "thanks everybody" at the end.
| sokoloff wrote:
| This seems so true and yet so depressing at the same time.
| telesilla wrote:
| We'll adapt. The kids will be ok.
| moritonal wrote:
| Spatial audio is also a big thing that's lacking. Because you're
| all equally balanced there's no sense of space.
| bearfood wrote:
| Check this project out for spacial audio meetings, misses the
| mark on the video piece but interesting none the less. It's
| built on jitsi meet. https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla
| noja wrote:
| _ding_ So that is what Apple is up to with the Pros. Thank you.
| mettamage wrote:
| I used to be a gamer. To me virtual meetings feel like a video
| game that simply has serious consequences. I don't see anything
| weird.
| phailhaus wrote:
| We are still missing basic primitives in video conferencing
| interfaces, and this failure of abstraction surfaces as "virtual
| meetings feel weird".
|
| * We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to speak;
| we don't need a fancy "pressure sensitive chair" to accomplish
| this.
|
| * Video conferencing apps still refuse to show everyone the same
| layout of faces. Because we don't share the same virtual space,
| of course our experiences feel disjointed.
|
| * We can't silently "react" to someone else speaking, making it
| difficult to intuit the consensus opinion. These reactions need
| to appear on _their_ tile, not on your own (looking at you,
| Zoom).
|
| These are not hard to implement, but conferencing solutions are
| so sticky that they just don't seem to have the incentive to
| improve their stagnant UI's.
| feanaro wrote:
| > * We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to
| speak; we don't need a fancy "pressure sensitive chair" to
| accomplish this.
|
| Jitsi Meet has this: https://meet.jit.si/
| slykar wrote:
| You can also use the hand you are born with. It will be even
| more visible. It didn't feel that awkward in school, so we
| can use it now too.
| toper-centage wrote:
| You can't in Google meet when there are more than a couple
| people, because meet refuses to show all participants.
| icebraining wrote:
| It now supports up to 49 people:
| https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/49-people-
| tile-...
| redisman wrote:
| This depends heavily on what layout everyone is using. We
| usually have a screenshare taking 90% of the space and if
| we have cameras on then most video conference software
| seems to show random 3 people in a small tile somewhere
| while the rest are just hidden.
| test1235 wrote:
| You can "raise your hand" in MS Teams as a signal to everyone
| else
| slykar wrote:
| Just raise your hand on the web cam. Move it closer to make it
| visible.
| hashkb wrote:
| "Raise hand" is an attempt to solve the right problem, but it
| doesn't solve it in a realistic way. Virtual meetings feel
| weird because we're all more Trumpy than we realize - in
| actuality nearly every speaker's turn ends with an impatient
| interruption by the next speaker. This just doesn't feel
| "natural" with the latency of a phone call or video conference.
| I know, it's cynical, but it's one reason we love to hate
| meetings - we never get to finish tal
| atoav wrote:
| I think a big one is actually latency and framerate. If you
| have a low latency videosetup (e.g. SDI Cameras and two
| monitors) you can try out what _real_ low latency feels like.
| This works soo much better already because you can react to one
| another 's mimic expression etc.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to
| speak
|
| MS Teams has a "raise hand" feature, is that the type of thing
| you're thinking about?
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/raise-your-hand-i...
| phreack wrote:
| Discord lights up the avatar's outline when they speak, which
| is fantastic by itself, but combined with push to talk it's
| perfect as you can convey the exact intention of taking over
| the conversation and solve it much more quickly when there's
| overlap than any 'raise hand' mechanism I've used. Those tend
| to just not work as raised hands get more ignored than just
| talking.
| pessimizer wrote:
| For me it's nothing that complicated. It's the latency that feels
| so weird.
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