
Zoom fatigue is real - domedefelice
https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/video-call-fatigue-tips/
======
replyifuagree
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.

~~~
blaser-waffle
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.

~~~
rectang
Ironically, what matters most for your own audio quality is that _other_
people use headsets — because feedback cancellation is an extremely difficult
algorithm which often malfunctions, and if someone wears a headset that
algorithm doesn't have to run.

But I'm shouting into the void about that. Most people won't adapt their
behavior when it doesn't impact them personally.

~~~
_nalply
Upstream bandwidth is similar. If someone has bad upstream you receive bad
video from them but for them it's just fine.

------
bentcorner
FYI, if you have an NVIDIA card on your machine, you can run their voice
filtering software: [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-
voice...](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice-setup-
guide/)

It works for non-RTX cards as well with some tweaking
([https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1670164](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.

~~~
earthscienceman
There has to be a non-NVIDIA solution to this doesn't there?

~~~
wuunderbar
Not at the moment from my research a few weeks ago. There's some sort of lock
which only allows it to work on the RTX cores.

------
jsherwani
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).

~~~
Corrado
> 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.

------
extra88
The article is easier to read on the site where it was originally posted:

[https://theconversation.com/zoom-fatigue-how-to-make-
video-c...](https://theconversation.com/zoom-fatigue-how-to-make-video-calls-
less-tiring-137861)

~~~
neogodless
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!)

EDIT: There is (at least one!)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/blacken/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/blacken/)

~~~
adrianmonk
Another difference is that with The Conversation, when I scroll to the bottom,
I get a dialog that says, "Get The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the
news" and "Subscribe now". Popular Science doesn't seem to have a dialog like
that.

------
lukethomas
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.

~~~
jasode
_> 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.

~~~
throwaway1239Mx
Thank you! Props for polite correction on someone straw-manning the OP.
Otherwise I likely wouldn't have looked into this one.

I've definitely noticed mental fatigue from the changed aural environment in
my house. I normally work from home, but now that my wife is also WFH, I've
realized that hearing her on zoom at the same time as I'm in a meeting (or
trying to concentrate) just _melts_ my brain. Can't actually comment on zoom
sound quality as have a pair of headphones that doesn't drive me completely
nuts, and didn't notice anything about it in the previous few years of WFH...

~~~
Ididntdothis
Same here. Having my girlfriend in the house and talking the whole day is
starting to really bother me. Thank god i have an office door I can close.

------
tootie
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?

~~~
Ididntdothis
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.

~~~
tootie
Yeah, I was talking about this with a friend recently. I think that straight
video conferencing is now pretty commoditized and cheap to execute. Facetime,
Meet, Duo, Teams, Zoom are fairly undifferentiated. And you see products like
Slack just drop video calling in without a lot of fanfare. I think there's
going to be another generation on very near horizon where we see video
software that is much more fit to purpose. One-on-one calls is not the same
use case and business meetings, presentations, fitness classes, classroom
situations. Streaming video and audio is easy, but there is a lot of room in
the user experience and modes of interaction to build more useful products
than just turning on a camera and microphone. Solving things like "eye
contact" or the equivalent could be done. And we definitely shouldn't stop at
just trying to model in-person interaction and really look at what the medium
allows that wasn't possible before.

~~~
Ididntdothis
“Solving things like "eye contact" or the equivalent could be done.“

I bet if you had several cameras you could compute a video feed where people
have direct eye contact instead of seeing them staring at a screen during a
conversation

~~~
tootie
You can track gaze with just a single web cam with something like webgazer.js
although it's not super precise. There are companies like Tobii that make
dedicated gaze tracking sensors in multiple form factors. The trick is
figuring out what to do with that information.

------
wintermutestwin
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...

~~~
saurik
> Our minds are programmed to interpret looking down as gaze avoidance. Seeing
> someone look down makes them seem disinterested or even dishonest.

How about someone looking over your head? (I have my camera set up _below_ my
monitor.)

~~~
wintermutestwin
Common wisdom is that you want your camera to be just above eye level slightly
looking down on you. The camera pointed up at your face is "unflattering."

~~~
saurik
I am 6'4" tall and so everyone is extremely used to looking up at me and it
even can feel very strange seeing a camera looking down at me ;P. But I am
more asking about stuff like "there is research which shows that if you are
looking down you look like you are hiding something but if you look up it
looks like you are arrogant or distracted or [fill in the blank]", not "is
this a flattering camera angle" ;P.

------
longtom
> Zoom fatigue is real.

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?

~~~
take_a_breath
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."

[1]
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavir...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavirus-
zoom-fatigue-is-taxing-the-brain-here-is-why-that-happens/)

[2] [https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-combat-zoom-
fatigue](https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-combat-zoom-fatigue)

[3] [https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-
video...](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-
are-so-exhausting)

~~~
longtom
Brief confusion and distraction is not the same as malaise.

~~~
take_a_breath
Nobody claimed they were, you introduced those words.

~~~
longtom
Fair enough. But if "mental exhaustion" is not some serious impediment, then
not sure this is worth talking about. Not seeing much evidence here.

------
_salmon
This article seems to address the problem of being a bad online meeting
participant which I see as different than Zoom Fatigue.

------
mseidl
Am I the only one that really hates being on webcam?

~~~
thrower123
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If someone is presenting it's useful to be able to gauge how well it's going,
whether people are paying attention, if they're bored, etc..

~~~
dylan604
Then let that be a presenter's view. Don't make everyone suffer through it.
When I'm in a room with people in a meeting, I'm focused on the presenter. I'm
not looking at everyone in the room at the same time.

~~~
0xffff2
In Teams at least, you can disable all incoming video.

------
Nasrudith
Really I find the large face array more draining than the audio - you usually
don't get a clear and in focus view of that many people.

~~~
soylentcola
Haven't messed with Zoom too much, but I find that in Webex and Hangouts, the
default is to focus the main "camera" on whoever has been talking for the past
few seconds. It doesn't engage immediately so there are no rapid cuts between
feeds just because someone cleared their throat or clicked a mouse while
someone was speaking.

Of course it isn't perfect. It depends on people taking turns to speak (as
they should, but can't always do if latency causes two people to start talking
at once). Still beats the "Brady Bunch" window I only see when I do social
meetings with a handful of friends on Friday evenings.

With those it's less of an issue since we're often on the couch in front of
the TV with a webcam mounted on top or in the kitchen making dinner with the
laptop open on the table anyway.

------
gherkinnn
Zoom bombing. Zoom fatigue.

Fascinating how an entirely new culture and vocabulary sprung up in no time.

~~~
dredmorbius
Coronaspeak: [https://language-and-
innovation.com/2020/04/15/coronaspeak-p...](https://language-and-
innovation.com/2020/04/15/coronaspeak-part-2-the-language-of-covid-19-goes-
viral/)

------
jpalomaki
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..

------
Mattasher
Based on an earlier discussion here on HN about Zoom burnout and latency I
recorded a cast episode about that very subject:

[https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/3-is-latency-
killing-o...](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/3-is-latency-killing-our-
minds/id1510813211?i=1000473654195)

~~~
rectang
Nice! I submitted your podcast to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179607)

------
avaer
In our WebXR community we hold business meetings in Mozilla Hubs or VRChat --
and we've closed contracts that way.

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
What do people think of "equalizing" your voice for these online meetings?
Reducing the higher frequencies in favor of lower ones.

Any tools on linux that can do this?

~~~
lincolnbryant
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Tone changes can help with audibility. I have a really low voice, it doesn't
carry well over voice-chat; I'd push my register up a few notes. But yes,
filtering tweety mic sounds from other people would be good too.

------
skapadia
Meeting fatigue is real.

