> Is there anything in particular you'd like to read about?
I'd love to get a better impression of what your setup, well, feels like. Specifically, three UX questions have been going through my mind lately – probably because I've been working from home for far too long haha :( and having a portal like yours would be fantastic!
1) How important, in your experience, is it for people to look (or have the impression of looking) into each other's eyes? What ways have you thought of that could accomplish that? Do you maybe even happen to have a solution? My gut feeling has been that being able to hold eye contact would go a long way towards making people on each side of the portal feel "close" to each other. So if this were possible somehow, his would be a game changer.
2) How would one do conference calls with your setup, UI-wise? (Let's assume for a moment that bandwidth is not a constraint.)
3) What about eye contact (question 1) when there's a group on each side of the "portal"? It seems almost impossible to achieve with a 2D screen.
Addendum, now that I've had even more time to think about this:
4) General question (I realized I should have asked this first): Where do you currently place the camera? Putting a webcam on top of a 27" monitor already makes holding eye contact challenging but I imagine it's even worse with a large screen where you put the camera at the very top or bottom because the camera will always film you at an angle.
5) In the context of question 2, the question of eye contact seems to be quite complicated, too. I imagine that at the very least one would need arrange all participants of the call in some fixed spatial layout that's the same for everyone but the camera angle still remains a challenge.
If you look closely at the images and videos on our website, you'll be able to spot it. It's often a fun game we play when giving a demo to someone new. Many people take quite awhile to find it and the AV nerds point it out almost instantly, haha
But yes, with the current setup you can't get perfect eye contact in all scenarios. It works surprisingly well in multi-person conversations though, as you can clearly see when someone shifts their focus on you vs. someone else next to you.
> But yes, with the current setup you can't get perfect eye contact in all scenarios. It works surprisingly well in multi-person conversations though, as you can clearly see when someone shifts their focus on you vs. someone else next to you.
Sweet, that's good to know!
> If you look closely at the images and videos on our website, you'll be able to spot it. It's often a fun game we play when giving a demo to someone new.
Hmmm… you made me have another, closer look this time. :) In one of the photos it looks like on the other party's side there is a projector near the ceiling in the back but then in subsequent photos that projector's light is gone and there's a different, stronger light that seems much closer to their camera/screen. Is this correct?
Also, have you considered/tried using an actual LCD screen? At our company we're currently dabbling with digital signage devices (for entirely different purposes) and the big ones are quite impressive. I could imagine that, in terms of dimensions and appearance, they would work quite well for your purposes.
> In one of the photos it looks like on the other party's side there is a projector near the ceiling in the back but then in subsequent photos that projector's light is gone and there's a different, stronger light that seems much closer to their camera/screen. Is this correct?
In those cases those are just normal overhead lights, nothing from a projector. The camera is actually in the screen!
> Also, have you considered/tried using an actual LCD screen? At our company we're currently dabbling with digital signage devices (for entirely different purposes) and the big ones are quite impressive.
Yeah we definitely want to move to panel displays when it becomes more feasible to do so. We haven't yet made a prototype with an LCD screen but I look forward to the day when we can, because projectors are a lot fussier to deal with.
That's great, looking forward to them! :)
> Is there anything in particular you'd like to read about?
I'd love to get a better impression of what your setup, well, feels like. Specifically, three UX questions have been going through my mind lately – probably because I've been working from home for far too long haha :( and having a portal like yours would be fantastic!
1) How important, in your experience, is it for people to look (or have the impression of looking) into each other's eyes? What ways have you thought of that could accomplish that? Do you maybe even happen to have a solution? My gut feeling has been that being able to hold eye contact would go a long way towards making people on each side of the portal feel "close" to each other. So if this were possible somehow, his would be a game changer.
2) How would one do conference calls with your setup, UI-wise? (Let's assume for a moment that bandwidth is not a constraint.)
3) What about eye contact (question 1) when there's a group on each side of the "portal"? It seems almost impossible to achieve with a 2D screen.