Oddbean new post about | logout
 I don't think VR will catch on anytime soon for interactions, kinda surprised nobody really has telepresence figured out in general (where you can look someone in the eyes with a little bit of video adjustments, vs looking at the camera..). I think telepresence is all that's missing from having more meaningful remote comms. 
 In my experience it is hella weird looking at someone in the eyes through a phone. I think it's because the action is stilted and forced where IRL human interaction relies more on a massive amount of subtle cues and bits of direct and indirect eye contact to emphasize points. 
 Oh, which software were you doing that with?  I know at some point FaceTime had a beta feature for this, but I dunno if they ever shipped it, I never was able to see it cause I don't do apple products.. I think maybe the only way to do it correctly would be a camera directly in the middle of the screen, while also having the screen show pixels there somehow.. 
 Nothing fancy, we were experimenting with a Duo call and trying to talk to each other but while trying to maintain eye contact, just to see what it'd be like. It was very, very weird lol 
 Hm, ya I don't think duo does the eye thing.. the problem is you have to have the ability to look at eyes, but also look away.  If the camera was directly on the eyes of the person you were talking to.. it would feel natural, I'm convinced of this.. but nobody's made an LCD that can do that...  the other option is software correction but that's not ready yet either. 
 Yeah, it could be because we were trying pretty hard to 'look in each other's eyes' as we were talking... Which, honestly, I'm sure didn't help. 

Have you seen any promising tech in this regard? 
 nope. The next gen oculus maybe, has eye tracking. I would wait for opensource to come out tho, if that really does start to work at the hardware level.