When was the last time you made eye contact on a video call? The answer is probably… never.
In this video I explain why eye contact is so important and how we can make it happen on video with a piece of hardware that has been around for decades.
Having experienced the difference between video calls with and without eye contact, I’ve become an eye contact evangelist. In this age of digital saturation and AI, live human to human communication is at a premium. When we have the precious opportunity to speak with one another, we want to be able to understand one another, to connect, to establish trust and for that, we need to make eye contact.
Studies cited in this video:
Troje, Nikolaus F. ‘Depth from Motion Parallax: Deictic Consistency, Eye Contact, and a Serious Problem with Zoom’. Journal of Vision 23, no. 10 (2023): 1. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.10.1.
Kano, Fumihiro, Yuri Kawaguchi, and Yeow Hanling. ‘Experimental Evidence That Uniformly White Sclera Enhances the Visibility of Eye-Gaze Direction in Humans and Chimpanzees’. eLife 11 (March 2022): e74086. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74086.
Regenbrecht, Holger, and Tobias Langlotz. ‘Mutual Gaze Support in Videoconferencing Reviewed’. Communications of the Association for Information Systems 37, no. 1 (2015). https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.03745.