Ultra-charitable interpretation: Perhaps they meant to use gaming voice communications instead of video conferences, because those voice comms work pretty well and video is 99.8 % unnecessary anyway.
<because those voice comms work pretty well and video is 99.8 % unnecessary anyway.
<sarcasm>
Imagine if there were a publicly available system that could switch connections directly between the end users, without the need for computers, or anything wireless? It could send uLaw companded audio in a 8,000 samples per second, to cover the 3 KHz bandwidth of human speech, with almost no latency. You could even hook circuits directly up to the end user equipment to avoid any need to share the audio channel. Because the bandwidth was dedicated on a switched channel, there would be no drop-outs or packet loss!
What an amazing improvement over cellphones and Bluetooth that would be.
getmibo.com is also working on a more interactive conferencing system. It uses a combination of video calling and a 3d world to spatially separate participants and adds new content like games while keeping the value of seeing someones actual realtime face.
We used Gather.Town for a virtual conference, a substitute for an event I've been running every November since 2010. It went really well, capturing the unique aspect of my event quite well, and mostly "just working". I was particularly pleased at how it mostly "just worked" for people who aren't into gaming or similar environments.
Not perfect, but it was pretty good, and people liked it.
I went to a social gathering of former co-workers using Gather.Town. Each person has an avatar which they walk around a 2-dimensional map. You see video (and audio) of everyone within a certain distance, and apparently if you’re in a “conference room” you see everyone in there. It did replicate the behavior of in-person parties where you groups would form, and people would join them or break off to find a new group. It was far better for the purpose than trying a Zoom call with 50 people, where there’s a single awkward conversation.
Some of the user interface was confusing as a first-time user, but overall it was effective and people wanted to do it again.
I'm not sure what the point is. I'm sure not interested in any sort of VR teleconferencing and I don't really want Second Life 2.0 either. I do think easier sharing of sketches and the like might be interesting--although that tends to require some commonality of hardware and whiteboards don't necessarily scale down to iPad size very well. (Furthermore, just shared docs actually serve a lot of the functions we thought we needed whiteboards for pretty well.)
"On top of standard-grade performance anxiety, the "big face" image that Zoom uses by default in its "speaker view" can trigger a "fight-or-flight" surge of adrenaline, writes Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford's Human Computer Interaction Lab."
From the hyperlink in the article. This for me is the kicker. From the start to end of a zoom call I feel like I'm on a stage. When I am in an in-person meeting I feel like I am "hanging out". One drains me of my mental reserves, the other fills it up. Zoom just feels draining. They noted the fact you see yourself and there is real time self critique to the hissy sound and pixelation. After a year of it .. I'm close to done.
I agree, seeing my self during a zoom call is similar to looking in the mirror at myself while in a meeting, i've never done it in person, and would be very odd to see someone do it during a meeting. Ive been trying out new approaches to tackling the "looking in the mirror" tendency I get while in a virtual call. So far, the simplest and most effective is just minimizing the zoom call all together and listening to everything. I've never needed to see myself during a meeting before, why do I need to now?
Interesting! I have noticed this is a thing for me as well. I have found that by disabling the display of my own video, I feel much more relaxed. I highly recommend you give this a try.
I suggested to the folks behind pop.com, which does not show your face to you, to implement some form of indirect feedback mechanism when your face is aligned and centered. I thought maybe a small face+camera icon that turns red/yellow/green depending on whether your face is not visible, sideways/non-centered, or centered and in focus. That way even if you don't see yourself, at least you will know that others can see you fine.
This should be trivial for the people at zoom to add. They already split the background and foreground in the video for displaying images that aren't the wall/messy room behind you.
This is interesting to hear. I have the opposite experience, I'm generally an anxious person and feel stressed going into meetings, especially with groups of new people. I've found that I'm much more relaxed on zoom calls than in person, I think because it feels like there is much more of a buffer between me and the people I'm talking to. Seeing faces on the screen does not provoke the same feeling as a real life meeting.
(Incidentally, I really dont like working remotely and want to get back to real meetings as soon as I can, even if it will make me more anxious in the moment)
What this really means is that different people are different and good collaboration tools will allow people to customize their experience while providing some kind of shared infrastructure. Even in an in-person meeting, you have lots of different behaviors, the people who chat to each other, the people who are super focused, the people who take notes on their laptop, the people who sit farther back in the room, the people who arrive late or leave early, the people who distribute the agenda, etc.
One trick with some videoconferencing software is to make the window smaller and put it at the top of your screen (or wherever the camera is). The other face will be smaller and you will be more directly looking at the camera and hence making eye contact which makes you look more natural to whomever you’re calling.
It doesn't make me anxious but it gives me exactly the same feeling I get when someone looks over my shoulder when I'm on LSD.
I haven't tried it for a big call yet, but Jitsi seems better. For just a chat Discord still reigns supreme for call-quality of the services I've tried, although it may be bad data because I'm usually playing a game or helping someone solve a problem rather than solely conversing.
I've done a couple of interviews via Codepen where you're watched over video while you come up with a solution, and it's much more difficult than a typical whiteboard interview.
I don't want to invalidate your experience at all, but I find exactly the opposite.
I do a lot of video pair programming, and I feel supremely comfortable screen/video sharing. Getting to work on my own machine with my own IDE and shell set-up, my own hardware in my comfortable home office, 10000% better than awkwardly scratching at a whiteboard speculating about what may or may not work if committed to code.
This is why I rarely go on video to begin with (well besides having my laptop in clamshell mode and not wanting a webcam literally pointing at my bed 24/7
I'm a firm believer that video adds nothing to the call other than add distractions.
> I'm a firm believer that video adds nothing to the call other than add distractions.
I agree. And I would add that voice does not add anything either. It's better to do everything by chat or by mail, that at least leaves a usable trace.
I wonder if we can compare our Briggs Myers personality categories ;-)
I’m the opposite. In-person meetings are extremely taxing while zoom meetings are very relaxing. I’d love to never have an in-person meeting ever again.
All we need is better designers. Video chat apps today are extremely naive and try to get away with "what if we just dump everyone in the same room and hope it works". Zoom added "reactions", but for some reason decided to only show reactions on your own tile. Push-to-talk is barely supported. None of them have implemented the bare minimum feature of showing participants in the same order. None of them have support for dynamic breakout rooms.
I swear, the best video chat experience I had was from The Go Game. At no point were you dumped into a massive shared room. Instead, people can join others at-will into small "rooms" of up to six people, which is much more manageable. Then you can implement whatever games you want and let people decide what they want to do. No need for next-gen hardware, no fancy "VR spaces", just a different interface paradigm that actually scales.
My team has had success with using Gather.Town as well! The only downside is that it is a little unwieldy, in that you have to be careful where you are positioned so that you don't accidentally lose contact. The "rules" of what constitutes a shared space and when you have to rely on proximity, are also a little unclear.
They're configurable. In our Xmas party house the entire kitchen is one broadcast domain, like the kitchen at a party. But in the local pub we built for Friday evenings we have "booths" and you must sit down in the booth to talk to people in that booth. By default it's just proximity, so like a real pub there were always two or three girls in the toilets having presumably a private chat.
So you do need somebody technical to make the space work how you need, and if your users are all non-technical you probably only want one type of rule everywhere or it'll confuse them.
It's down to the design of the space. We made our own, and "Private Spaces" were visually distinguished by "carpets" ... it made a huge difference. The rules for shared space vs proximity are very clear, but the design of the graphics need to be clear and consistent.
Gather.Town is interesting, but it has its own issues. We just used it last Friday for a company offsite, and these issues killed the experience for myself and a few others:
1. You don’t see who is speaking when there are many people present— you have to scroll through participants to find the person talking. Lots of new employees, I didn’t know who was talking about half the time
2. Connection issues. I couldn’t hear the speaker but others could, for extended periods of time. Missed entire presentations due to this unfortunately, as I couldn’t hear or have any means of connecting to the speaker.
Don’t get me wrong it’s fun software, but it’s not ready to be your rock solid all-hands replacement quite yet. Had the pleasure of experiencing Welcome at one of the YC networking events, and that worked really well, curious to hear if they’re interested in filling this gap
> Connection issues. I couldn’t hear the speaker but others could, for extended periods of time. Missed entire presentations due to this ...
Was the speaker at a podium? Were they spotlighted? Were you close to them?
There are several reasons why you might not have been able to connect that are part of the design. We found initially people were confused by the connection rules, but once they got the hang of it, it all "just worked".
I agree completely that it takes time to get used to, and perhaps you did have genuine connection issues, but we ran with 150 to 200 people for 48 hours without any significant[0] identified connection issues, which is why I wonder if it was mis-identification of a "symptom".
I'll check out "Welcome".
[0] There were occasions when people needed to reload the tab, but doing so always fixed the problem.
As for the connection issues, we were all next to each other at a conference room table, not an issue of proximity. I was able to hear the person at first, then they cut off and didn’t come back, even after reloading the page it seemed but I only tried once and then gave up to be honest :p
FWIW the person I could no longer hear was located across the globe, so maybe that’s related.
I apologize for not having a more thorough write up of what happened, but it was certainly a real issue.
There's no need to apologise ... it's perfectly reasonable that you should say something short and clear, but not in complete depth. Your elaboration gives me useful information ... thank you.
It does sound like it was a real issue ... have you provided feedback to Gather.Town? Perhaps it is related to the speaker being across the globe, and they could find that useful, even if anecdotal. It's still a data point, pointing at a potential underlying problem.
Hey Cory! CEO of Gather.Town here. Connection issues are always our top priority, and at this point, we're chasing down and squashing the last 1% of bugs. If you run into this in the future, reporting a bug will help us solve the issue! (Grape icon > send feedback/bug)
As for the other issue, active speaker detection is on our near-term roadmap. It's become more pressing for us too, as our team has grown and no longer fits in one page :P
I’ll keep the feedback method in mind for future usages!
Also, I get it, having started to work with the WebRTC stack myself. While the service is free to use I think I can stomach a few issues while it’s actively being worked on :)
>"what if we just dump everyone in the same room and hope it works"
Yep, it's pretty abysmal for class settings.
I know it's partly down to configuration/instructors but being shoved into a room by an instructor with 40 other people forced to stare into a webcam while watching everyone else doing the same is not an ideal environment.
There needs to be a lot more attention on how and when to select additional participants in the general case where there's only one or two priority speakers and the rest are basically just sitting around listening.
Now of course me personally I'd just rather not use a webcam at all (Or only when specifically called on), but often that's not a choice unfortunately.
Most new companies in this space have been using "AI" marketing to pitch a better world of video conferencing and it's been largely a failure. (unless you call getting bought and then shut down by Cisco a win)
But I 100% agree with you that this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI. Innovation is the sum of behavior change and AI is not going to be doing our knowledge work for us anytime soon. Given we're doin the work, we deserve better tools to do it ourselves.
I'm currently building grain.co that layers a new kind of video conferencing on top of Zoom, focused on brokering the recorded information gathered during sync calls into the async tools where knowledge lives and actual work is done after the convo ends.
Our approach is to make it easy to annotate in real-time, clip out those parts you want to save/share, and then push them into async tools where anyone can view them like it were text in a document or a message in Slack.
> [...] this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI
> [...] I'm currently building grain.co [...]
> (From website)
> Instantly record, transcribe, and highlight the best parts of your Zoom video calls.
EDIT: not a criticism, just made me think of a tangentially related thing:
This is so emblematic of how AI is a moving target. Once something becomes an everyday tool it's no longer AI?
Not so long ago, being able to transcribe speech from multiple people in natural conversation would be the hallmark of AI research.
> None of them have implemented the bare minimum feature of showing participants in the same order.
This is one of the things that bugs me the most. It makes it really difficult to have a shared conversation, such as going around the room answering a question.
Every. Time. I don't think they realize what a big deal that one small feature would be. How can video chat platforms boast about "shared spaces" when not even the participant order is shared?!
Because it's not a feature that will show in quick demo used to sell the product which will lock-in everyone supposed to cooperate using it, ensuring high MAU metric that will drive business KPIs and company validation up.
You can on zoom (at least if you’re the host and the other is presenter). I use this all the time. It might even work if you’re not the host. I think it’s called Annotations- but the friction is that it’s a meta mode and IIRC you can’t do that while living in the main menu.
The advantage of push-to-talk is that you are muted by default (necessary for large groups), and the app knows when you want to talk because you have to push the talk button. That is extremely valuable information that you can use to build other features on top of. For example, there's no need for a "raise hand" button anymore, since pushing the talk button clearly signals your intent to speak. The UI can highlight your square, make it larger, whatever, which can make the whole experience a lot smoother.
It's because none of the video chat apps are competing on features, only on user lockdown. Their KPIs is how many users they have, and that only needs enough features/price to convince the corporate buyer which rarely accepts feedback from larger set of employees.
As such, outside of certain older very expensive corporate videoconferencing setups that remember targeting inter-corporate meetings and the like, the actual feature set ossified. You get some things that are easy to demo in 1:1 call, you get locked down room systems that leave me weeping for Webex ffs, and you get omnipresent WebRTC in-browser setup that often murders your CPU unless you get lucky.
I find it really bad that the best video conference experience I ever had involved Cisco Webex hardware and Bluejeans, all interconnected with so-maligned SIP. And before that, the glorious days of wider ITU-T based video conferencing, like NetMeeting with its whiteboards and active screensharing.
Imagine if video conferencing solutions competed on top of common protocols, and you'd separately invest in infrastructure and clients? Instead of the rare enterprise cases where Lync/Teams/Webex/other SIP is set on dedicated lines in large corporation, make similar setups common everywhere (WebRTC/SIP bridges/transcoders on the edge, with dedicated bandwidth bough by company, etc.?) with vendors competing on something more than "you have to use our stack because we don't interoperate with anyone else".
Sincerely, someone who has had enough keeping 3-5 video conferencing apps around.
Different people like different things. Last year I had a team of ~8 people who hadn't worked together before working closely together. Cameras on most of the time helped us build relationships. I've just joined a different team now (who have been working together for 3 months already) and it's really hard to feel like I'm part of the group.
I’d like wireless webcam tech to evolve in the same way that we now have robust, ubiquitous protocols and hardware for wireless audio. It should be as easy to switch source to one of your wireless/Bluetooth webcams as it is to switch audio output to a Bluetooth speaker.
Super agree that new modes of conferencing software are needed -- I see similar ideas, "drifting locational chats" come up a lot, but it's never seemed to 'fix' things in my experience.
I'm personally an advocate for more asynchronous communication, for less video (I find video very tiring and time-consuming), and for more audio at work. I feel audio is the sweet spot of informal, low effort, and still more emotionally engaging than pure text. I believe this so much that I'm actually building a chat application, called heysync[1].
It's somewhere between slack and discord in terms of features, but intended to allow for asynchronous, conversational audio to fit directly into the way teams already chat. You speak, and it can play live to any teammate who's listening right then, but it also records the audio, and transcribes it inline with regular chat, so the message can be easily read or listened to in-context later, allowing for true asynchronous audio conversations without dedicated audio rooms. Of course, you can also just chat via text like you would with slack or IRC.
There is an early info site up at https://heysync.chat/ if anyone's interested in this idea :)
I was contemplating async audio earlier today, and thought it would be nice to be able to attach audio responses directly to different team conversations. That way you can compose and conduct different discussions in a branching tree structure like manner, but still have the warmth of voice.
Anyone who prefers text, could view a transcript or submit text.
You can add all kinds of fancy stuff, you can improve the design and usability of the UI's but here's a big important problem waiting to be solved: audio quality and graceful degrading of the quality when needed.
At the end of the day we want to be heard in the first place. Nothing is more irritating than someone's (or your own) poor connection that makes people ask each other to repeat, watch participants freeze, wait, waste time trying to reconnect etc. etc.
Can it be solved? Degrade the quality, compress more but deliver the human speech as nicely as possible, on time. I feel not all options have been tried in this area yet.
There has to be something these companies are doing wrong. When I use discord, even while on mobile data and walking around, the audio quality is flawless (or as good as the mic) Why is it that ms teams and the rest end up sounding worse than AM radio?
Audio is hard, then audio streaming adds anohter layer of complexity. Even a relatively trivial problem of audio feedback hasn't been solved in all software yet - occasionally you hear echoes in some of them (Skype, WhatsApp?), or otherwise the peer is interrupted when you speak making talking simultaneously imposslbe and the whole experience irritatingly poor. It all seems like a downgrade from the classical telephony where you didn't have those problems.
Pick a popular video chat application, have you and someone else on the same wireless network both join the same chat, go into separate rooms to avoid crosstalk on the mics.
Have one person talk, then realize there is a half a second lag.
It's possible, but it's not likely to come from established players. And it's going to have to sacrifice visual quality or use a ton of bandwidth (or both).
I don't know if video calling tends to multiplex audio and video, or send separate streams; multiplexing audio onto the video could help reduce audio delay though. Standard voip uses a packet rate of 50 pps for audio, which means at least 20 ms between sampling and sending. Reducing that would be nice.
> It's possible, but it's not likely to come from established players. And it's going to have to sacrifice visual quality or use a ton of bandwidth (or both).
Switching to Peer to Peer for 1:1 or small group chats would be nice.
Low latency requirements being part of the BT spec would also be nice[1].
OS's fixing their drivers and entire end to end audio stack, that'd also be nice. Get that end to end latency locally to less than the e2e latency of the network packets!
[1] Qualcomm has a low latency version of apt-x which is actually low latency, and Apple does fine with Airpods connected to Mac hardware.
AirPods Pro connected to Mac hardware still run 144ms. That’s an eternity in live audio world, latency for a genuinely “pro” digital wireless microphone system is closer to 1.4ms.
That is... so bad. How? Did they let the same people who designed Bluetooth LE's ANCS[1] go hog wild with the desktop stack?
Edit: Also I wish that site tested latency for phone calls, since that is often a different protocol.
[1] ANCS is, or at least last time I looked at it, a protocol designed by people who had obviously NEVER worked in the embedded or low power space. No limit on message size and no headers indicating the size of the incoming payload are two giant tells.
AFAIK the killer is (video) encoding latency, which in turn comes from a tradeoff between encoding efficiency (bandwidth use) and number of frames that need to be "buffered" inside the encoder. This is exhibited inside the videoconferencing software and the webcam itself (AFAIK webcams don't send an uncompressed stream to the computer).
Because packet based networks are the worst basis for real time communication. There is a good reason there's a whole separate international connection oriented network for making phone calls (it's a shame it's no good for video - unsurprisingly the internet wins on open platforms and innovation).
There are two important differences with VC compared to that ping:
You're not trying to exchange data with a CDN built for exactly that purpose, you're trying to exchange it with someone else's (probably crappy) internet connection. The analogy I used the other day is "your supermarket has better roads to it than your friend's house".
You're probably pinging 32 or 64 bytes. Now try that again at a more realistic video data rate (not that the CDN endpoint will allow that). Keeping latency down is a lot easier on small packets than on full pipes.
It seems like every single application had bits and pieces of what is needed but no one has still been able to offer the entire package.
- Zoom definitely has mastered the ease of logging in whether you have the application or not as well as the ability to see multiple people, but obviously they have had their privacy issues.
- Teams seems to have good screen sharing and chatting integrated as well as some other small features here and there, but if you dont have the application, it takes some time and the browser based isnt bad but could be better.
- Google Meet- All sorts of improvements are needed...
- Jitsi - Definitely has its positives but I have always had connection issues for whatever reason.
Would love to see Apple do something more with Facetime...
This is the sort of thing I've been thinking about in building Bucket Brigade (https://echo.jefftk.com). It's video chat, but you can switch into a mode for singing. Each person is in a bucket, and you can hear the people in earlier buckets and be heard by the people in later buckets.
Unfortunately I can't recall the names of the startups or the related sub-industry, but there are multiple categories of software that are in this area, and many startups.
I found one called "onespace" in my search now but there are quite a lot of them.
The creator of Nim was involved with one called "3dicc".
The are multiple recent top-down localized audio ones.
I have been thinking about this. you know how computer nerds have been using IRC, email, source control, github etc. to work online for decades?
And you know how highly competitive e-gaming teams compete at things like Rainbow Six and other things without being in the same room? (Not for a tournament, but competitive enough to beat any casual team online).
I feel like, yes there is lots of room for improvement, but part of this is actually being overblown. By people not willing to type in a Discord or who don't own a comfortable headset and know how to use it. Or people who have not learned how to use an online whiteboarding system or Google Docs etc.
I am excited about the optical waveguide AR/VR systems getting cheaper and consumer-oriented because they are so lightweight. I actually personally find that VR is often more direct interaction than I want. Things like Spatial and VR Chat are mainly missing eye contact but that eye tracking is coming within a few years.
I just want a client that auto connects me a set number of minutes before the meeting. And other “smart client” basic features.
I have zoom meetings that prompt me for my name every time. I don’t want to create a zoom profile, I don’t want to login in. I just want it to remember my name, on the client.
I think stuff like this will get ironed out now that folks are using it day in and day out. Although, it’s still funny how it hasn’t hit 100% yet. My org has been 100% teleworking since April and last week someone said “this is the first time I’ve done a Teams meeting.” I was so curious and wanted to figure out how she’s avoided any video calls (my org is 100% Teams) for so long.
You want webex. Its not auto, but it pops up with a countdown letting you know when it's possible to join a call, typically 5 minutes prior to the meeting. This fixes the problem of everyone joining in 2 minutes after their last outlook alert.
There are huge potentials for disruption in the VC market. If Facebook would give free Oculus Quest to all its employees I think we would have VC in VR by now. The big problem is presence, and organic discussions in large groups. The grid view of Zoom et al. still sucks. There needs to be a 3D, or AR, or VR experience that allows us to move freely and talk more naturally to people in the room.
Latency is always going to be an issue unfortunately, maybe the camera could be better at recognizing facial expression and body language to indicate when someone is about to speak, or wants to speak.
I think VR could be really cool solution to some of the problems with video calls, but the headsets are just too heavy at this point. I have an oculus quest 1 and can't stand wearing it more than maybe 30 or 40 minutes, it just hurts my face. I've tried adding weight to the back, etc., but haven't found a good solution. I have a 20th percentile head size (a really big noggin) so maybe I'm in the minority that wouldn't like this... yet. Maybe some VC could help push to lighter tech.
I haven't tried the Quest 2, but I hear it's lighter. Also have yet to try a Valve Index.
At this point in my experience with video calls, I'm just happy when everybody's wearing headphones so they don't get their audio dropped when somebody talks over them.
Anybody here use blue jeans? Or can explain why it feels so much better to me? Whatever they do for audio is magic. I spend half my day on teams and 4 to 5 hours a week in zoom, and both are totally exhausting. I bought my own blue jeans account and I push it on family/friends just because the audio ...makes sense to my brain. I /enjoy/ talking to people there. I even convinced my d&d group to switch from hangouts/meet/duo/allo/??? And they seem to agree, blue jeans+roll20 is great.
Yes! We used it extensively in my previous industry (film VFX) and it was fantastic. I moved somewhere that's all zoom and it honestly feels like a step back in time. BlueJeans is great, with a cisco web phone camera thing it was the pinnacle of VC in my opinion.
I live 30ms away from my boss. What do I have to do to get low latency 4k (or 1080 since 4k cams are expensive) conferencing for one on ones? Serious question. This was a problem before wfh and now it's an even bigger issue for me. Id rather work somewhere for half the income where I have to mask up and deal with people if it means I can stop spending hours on terrible video calls every day.
I don't know if there's a realistic way to get low latency video[1]. But the way to get low latency audio is to get as close to POTS as you can. All of the little delays here and there on modern internet audio paths add up. More so if you've got wifi on either side.
[1] I mean, ISDN video calling is probably low latency, but good luck getting an ISDN line installed these days, and video quality was trash.
I've come to two conclusions about video conferences:
I really like cameras on so I can see people's faces. It feels much more like seeing people in person and the fact that my new team doesn't do that is making it harder to feel part of a group.
While I really like cameras on for calls, video quality isn't important (to me), but audio quality really is. Bad audio whether it's background noise, bad internet, echo etc. makes vc very tiring. The video could be 640x480 and 1 FPS and that would probably be fine - helps me know there's a real person on the other end of the call.
Audio carries 80% of the intellectual content of most telepresence. That's why when there's a live cross on TV News and the video works but the audio is missing, they give up and return to the studio until the audio is up.
The UI for every video chat app I've ever used is complete garbage. As for why, my best guess is that there is no money in selling video chat apps directly to consumers. Instead, they sell to businesses, in which case things like having a quality end-user experience is not a very competitive feature.
There's a mutant strain in South Africa that could potentially be vaccine resistant. Let's hope either it isn't or that turnaround time for a modified vaccine is pretty fast.
Over the past year I've been invited to, and become involved with, several organisations that are not within commuting distance. Video conferencing allows this, but it's still not great. Better video conferencing makes it a better experience, and more conferencing apps gives more choice, and makes providers compete to get better.
We don't need more video conferencing apps, but the end of the pandemic is mostly irrelevant.
Because many people will remain WFH even after the vaccine rollout. Video conferencing will be essential to connect those that go into the office with those who don't, especially during mixed in person/remote meetings.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadMaybe "Gaming" suits some people, but not everyone.
<sarcasm>
Imagine if there were a publicly available system that could switch connections directly between the end users, without the need for computers, or anything wireless? It could send uLaw companded audio in a 8,000 samples per second, to cover the 3 KHz bandwidth of human speech, with almost no latency. You could even hook circuits directly up to the end user equipment to avoid any need to share the audio channel. Because the bandwidth was dedicated on a switched channel, there would be no drop-outs or packet loss!
What an amazing improvement over cellphones and Bluetooth that would be.
</sarcasm>
Not perfect, but it was pretty good, and people liked it.
https://gather.town
Some of the user interface was confusing as a first-time user, but overall it was effective and people wanted to do it again.
From the hyperlink in the article. This for me is the kicker. From the start to end of a zoom call I feel like I'm on a stage. When I am in an in-person meeting I feel like I am "hanging out". One drains me of my mental reserves, the other fills it up. Zoom just feels draining. They noted the fact you see yourself and there is real time self critique to the hissy sound and pixelation. After a year of it .. I'm close to done.
I wish it had a two-tone high-contrast filtered version of myself, that I could use merely for positioning. Might be a potential solve?
(Incidentally, I really dont like working remotely and want to get back to real meetings as soon as I can, even if it will make me more anxious in the moment)
I haven't tried it for a big call yet, but Jitsi seems better. For just a chat Discord still reigns supreme for call-quality of the services I've tried, although it may be bad data because I'm usually playing a game or helping someone solve a problem rather than solely conversing.
I do a lot of video pair programming, and I feel supremely comfortable screen/video sharing. Getting to work on my own machine with my own IDE and shell set-up, my own hardware in my comfortable home office, 10000% better than awkwardly scratching at a whiteboard speculating about what may or may not work if committed to code.
I'm a firm believer that video adds nothing to the call other than add distractions.
I agree. And I would add that voice does not add anything either. It's better to do everything by chat or by mail, that at least leaves a usable trace.
I’m the opposite. In-person meetings are extremely taxing while zoom meetings are very relaxing. I’d love to never have an in-person meeting ever again.
I swear, the best video chat experience I had was from The Go Game. At no point were you dumped into a massive shared room. Instead, people can join others at-will into small "rooms" of up to six people, which is much more manageable. Then you can implement whatever games you want and let people decide what they want to do. No need for next-gen hardware, no fancy "VR spaces", just a different interface paradigm that actually scales.
So you do need somebody technical to make the space work how you need, and if your users are all non-technical you probably only want one type of rule everywhere or it'll confuse them.
If you do that, it works a treat.
1. You don’t see who is speaking when there are many people present— you have to scroll through participants to find the person talking. Lots of new employees, I didn’t know who was talking about half the time
2. Connection issues. I couldn’t hear the speaker but others could, for extended periods of time. Missed entire presentations due to this unfortunately, as I couldn’t hear or have any means of connecting to the speaker.
Don’t get me wrong it’s fun software, but it’s not ready to be your rock solid all-hands replacement quite yet. Had the pleasure of experiencing Welcome at one of the YC networking events, and that worked really well, curious to hear if they’re interested in filling this gap
Was the speaker at a podium? Were they spotlighted? Were you close to them?
There are several reasons why you might not have been able to connect that are part of the design. We found initially people were confused by the connection rules, but once they got the hang of it, it all "just worked".
I agree completely that it takes time to get used to, and perhaps you did have genuine connection issues, but we ran with 150 to 200 people for 48 hours without any significant[0] identified connection issues, which is why I wonder if it was mis-identification of a "symptom".
I'll check out "Welcome".
[0] There were occasions when people needed to reload the tab, but doing so always fixed the problem.
FWIW the person I could no longer hear was located across the globe, so maybe that’s related.
I apologize for not having a more thorough write up of what happened, but it was certainly a real issue.
It does sound like it was a real issue ... have you provided feedback to Gather.Town? Perhaps it is related to the speaker being across the globe, and they could find that useful, even if anecdotal. It's still a data point, pointing at a potential underlying problem.
Regardless, thanks for the reply. (and NRN)
As for the other issue, active speaker detection is on our near-term roadmap. It's become more pressing for us too, as our team has grown and no longer fits in one page :P
Thanks for the feedback!
I’ll keep the feedback method in mind for future usages!
Also, I get it, having started to work with the WebRTC stack myself. While the service is free to use I think I can stomach a few issues while it’s actively being worked on :)
Indeed!
I just had longer post about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25689370 because people try to solve problems that are already solvable by P2T
Yep, it's pretty abysmal for class settings.
I know it's partly down to configuration/instructors but being shoved into a room by an instructor with 40 other people forced to stare into a webcam while watching everyone else doing the same is not an ideal environment.
There needs to be a lot more attention on how and when to select additional participants in the general case where there's only one or two priority speakers and the rest are basically just sitting around listening.
Now of course me personally I'd just rather not use a webcam at all (Or only when specifically called on), but often that's not a choice unfortunately.
But I 100% agree with you that this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI. Innovation is the sum of behavior change and AI is not going to be doing our knowledge work for us anytime soon. Given we're doin the work, we deserve better tools to do it ourselves.
I'm currently building grain.co that layers a new kind of video conferencing on top of Zoom, focused on brokering the recorded information gathered during sync calls into the async tools where knowledge lives and actual work is done after the convo ends.
Our approach is to make it easy to annotate in real-time, clip out those parts you want to save/share, and then push them into async tools where anyone can view them like it were text in a document or a message in Slack.
EDIT: not a criticism, just made me think of a tangentially related thing:
This is so emblematic of how AI is a moving target. Once something becomes an everyday tool it's no longer AI?
Not so long ago, being able to transcribe speech from multiple people in natural conversation would be the hallmark of AI research.
This is one of the things that bugs me the most. It makes it really difficult to have a shared conversation, such as going around the room answering a question.
I've been using [1] for system-wide push-to-talk on OSX and it has worked well for the most part.
[1] https://github.com/yulrizka/osx-push-to-talk
It's because none of the video chat apps are competing on features, only on user lockdown. Their KPIs is how many users they have, and that only needs enough features/price to convince the corporate buyer which rarely accepts feedback from larger set of employees.
As such, outside of certain older very expensive corporate videoconferencing setups that remember targeting inter-corporate meetings and the like, the actual feature set ossified. You get some things that are easy to demo in 1:1 call, you get locked down room systems that leave me weeping for Webex ffs, and you get omnipresent WebRTC in-browser setup that often murders your CPU unless you get lucky.
I find it really bad that the best video conference experience I ever had involved Cisco Webex hardware and Bluejeans, all interconnected with so-maligned SIP. And before that, the glorious days of wider ITU-T based video conferencing, like NetMeeting with its whiteboards and active screensharing.
Imagine if video conferencing solutions competed on top of common protocols, and you'd separately invest in infrastructure and clients? Instead of the rare enterprise cases where Lync/Teams/Webex/other SIP is set on dedicated lines in large corporation, make similar setups common everywhere (WebRTC/SIP bridges/transcoders on the edge, with dedicated bandwidth bough by company, etc.?) with vendors competing on something more than "you have to use our stack because we don't interoperate with anyone else".
Sincerely, someone who has had enough keeping 3-5 video conferencing apps around.
For those not familiar with the "Finnish bus stop": https://twitter.com/eeroramo/status/1238524451509145603
Different people like different things. Last year I had a team of ~8 people who hadn't worked together before working closely together. Cameras on most of the time helped us build relationships. I've just joined a different team now (who have been working together for 3 months already) and it's really hard to feel like I'm part of the group.
What's your issue with video on?
I'm personally an advocate for more asynchronous communication, for less video (I find video very tiring and time-consuming), and for more audio at work. I feel audio is the sweet spot of informal, low effort, and still more emotionally engaging than pure text. I believe this so much that I'm actually building a chat application, called heysync[1].
It's somewhere between slack and discord in terms of features, but intended to allow for asynchronous, conversational audio to fit directly into the way teams already chat. You speak, and it can play live to any teammate who's listening right then, but it also records the audio, and transcribes it inline with regular chat, so the message can be easily read or listened to in-context later, allowing for true asynchronous audio conversations without dedicated audio rooms. Of course, you can also just chat via text like you would with slack or IRC.
There is an early info site up at https://heysync.chat/ if anyone's interested in this idea :)
Anyone who prefers text, could view a transcript or submit text.
At the end of the day we want to be heard in the first place. Nothing is more irritating than someone's (or your own) poor connection that makes people ask each other to repeat, watch participants freeze, wait, waste time trying to reconnect etc. etc.
Can it be solved? Degrade the quality, compress more but deliver the human speech as nicely as possible, on time. I feel not all options have been tried in this area yet.
I've looked around a lot and couldn't find anything that isn't a complete CPU hog.
Pick a popular video chat application, have you and someone else on the same wireless network both join the same chat, go into separate rooms to avoid crosstalk on the mics.
Have one person talk, then realize there is a half a second lag.
It doesn't help that many bluetooth headsets add up to 200ms of latency (!!) https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/connectivity/bluetoo...
We'd be better off using analog telephone lines and 900mhz wireless headsets from the 90s.
I don't know if video calling tends to multiplex audio and video, or send separate streams; multiplexing audio onto the video could help reduce audio delay though. Standard voip uses a packet rate of 50 pps for audio, which means at least 20 ms between sampling and sending. Reducing that would be nice.
Switching to Peer to Peer for 1:1 or small group chats would be nice.
Low latency requirements being part of the BT spec would also be nice[1].
OS's fixing their drivers and entire end to end audio stack, that'd also be nice. Get that end to end latency locally to less than the e2e latency of the network packets!
[1] Qualcomm has a low latency version of apt-x which is actually low latency, and Apple does fine with Airpods connected to Mac hardware.
That is... so bad. How? Did they let the same people who designed Bluetooth LE's ANCS[1] go hog wild with the desktop stack?
Edit: Also I wish that site tested latency for phone calls, since that is often a different protocol.
[1] ANCS is, or at least last time I looked at it, a protocol designed by people who had obviously NEVER worked in the embedded or low power space. No limit on message size and no headers indicating the size of the incoming payload are two giant tells.
There are two important differences with VC compared to that ping: You're not trying to exchange data with a CDN built for exactly that purpose, you're trying to exchange it with someone else's (probably crappy) internet connection. The analogy I used the other day is "your supermarket has better roads to it than your friend's house".
You're probably pinging 32 or 64 bytes. Now try that again at a more realistic video data rate (not that the CDN endpoint will allow that). Keeping latency down is a lot easier on small packets than on full pipes.
- Zoom definitely has mastered the ease of logging in whether you have the application or not as well as the ability to see multiple people, but obviously they have had their privacy issues.
- Teams seems to have good screen sharing and chatting integrated as well as some other small features here and there, but if you dont have the application, it takes some time and the browser based isnt bad but could be better.
- Google Meet- All sorts of improvements are needed...
- Jitsi - Definitely has its positives but I have always had connection issues for whatever reason.
Would love to see Apple do something more with Facetime...
I found one called "onespace" in my search now but there are quite a lot of them.
The creator of Nim was involved with one called "3dicc".
The are multiple recent top-down localized audio ones.
And you know how highly competitive e-gaming teams compete at things like Rainbow Six and other things without being in the same room? (Not for a tournament, but competitive enough to beat any casual team online).
I feel like, yes there is lots of room for improvement, but part of this is actually being overblown. By people not willing to type in a Discord or who don't own a comfortable headset and know how to use it. Or people who have not learned how to use an online whiteboarding system or Google Docs etc.
I have zoom meetings that prompt me for my name every time. I don’t want to create a zoom profile, I don’t want to login in. I just want it to remember my name, on the client.
I think stuff like this will get ironed out now that folks are using it day in and day out. Although, it’s still funny how it hasn’t hit 100% yet. My org has been 100% teleworking since April and last week someone said “this is the first time I’ve done a Teams meeting.” I was so curious and wanted to figure out how she’s avoided any video calls (my org is 100% Teams) for so long.
Latency is always going to be an issue unfortunately, maybe the camera could be better at recognizing facial expression and body language to indicate when someone is about to speak, or wants to speak.
I haven't tried the Quest 2, but I hear it's lighter. Also have yet to try a Valve Index.
At this point in my experience with video calls, I'm just happy when everybody's wearing headphones so they don't get their audio dropped when somebody talks over them.
[1] I mean, ISDN video calling is probably low latency, but good luck getting an ISDN line installed these days, and video quality was trash.
I really like cameras on so I can see people's faces. It feels much more like seeing people in person and the fact that my new team doesn't do that is making it harder to feel part of a group.
While I really like cameras on for calls, video quality isn't important (to me), but audio quality really is. Bad audio whether it's background noise, bad internet, echo etc. makes vc very tiring. The video could be 640x480 and 1 FPS and that would probably be fine - helps me know there's a real person on the other end of the call.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-04/south-afr...
We don't need more video conferencing apps, but the end of the pandemic is mostly irrelevant.