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We are still missing basic primitives in video conferencing interfaces, and this failure of abstraction surfaces as "virtual meetings feel weird". * We still d

• wcoenen 6y ago
  > We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to speak MS Teams has a "raise hand" feature, is that the type of thing you're thinking about? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/raise-your-hand-in-a-teams-meeting-bb2dd8e1-e6bd-43a6-85cf-30822667b372 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/raise-your-hand-i...
  • phreack 6y ago
    Discord lights up the avatar's outline when they speak, which is fantastic by itself, but combined with push to talk it's perfect as you can convey the exact intention of taking over the conversation and solve it much more quickly when there's overlap than any 'raise hand' mechanism I've used. Those tend to just not work as raised hands get more ignored than just talking.
  • 7ewis 6y ago
    Google Meet also has this too.
  • mft_ 6y ago
    Zoom has it too - we use it regularly.
  • crehn 6y ago
    Chime does too. And it feels very clumsy.
  • phailhaus 6y ago
    It's...something. But it still doesn't feel quite right. A formal "raise hand" button feels too clumsy of a replacement for the natural body language we use to imply that we want to jump in to say something. I don't want a button that "requests the floor", we need something more fluid than that. Basically the situation we need to avoid is the example raised in the article, wherein two people stumble around each other trying to figure out who should speak and who should back off. The reason that happens is that both participants have no clue that the other person is about to speak until they already have. Discord solves this beautifully with push-to-talk. Since I have to press the push to talk button _before_ I speak, the UI can hook into that to naturally indicate that I intend to speak just by lighting myself up. I can just hold down the button and wait for the current speaker to cede, or jump in myself at a suitable pause. This latter case is now possible since everyone in the chat can see that I am about to do that, rather than be caught by surprise. But more importantly, _I can back off myself_ just by letting go. In Teams, you'd have to "rescind" the raised hand explicitly (not even sure if this is possible). Now combine this with a shared virtual space: everyone sees the same order of faces, and when someone pushes-to-talk, they move up. Everyone sees this at the same time, so it's much more natural for that person to start speaking!
    • naniwaduni 6y ago
      As a counterpoint, I feel that a lot of in-person meetings would be improved by having people discretely request the floor rather than relying on having your body language acknowledged. Certainly it would help for those of us to whom aggressive/imposing body language doesn't come as easily.
      • phailhaus 6y ago
        That's just reality: some people are not attentive and will steamroll others. It's up to us to jump in and help people get heard. If we start running into the same problems as real life, then we're going in the right direction. I think a "request the floor" button still has its place in much larger group events (imagine a seminar), but for small to medium meetings it's pretty overkill. The goal should be to lower the bar for fluid conversation, rather than to formalize it into a turn-taking process.
• feanaro 6y ago
  > * We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to speak; we don't need a fancy "pressure sensitive chair" to accomplish this. Jitsi Meet has this: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
  • slykar 6y ago
    You can also use the hand you are born with. It will be even more visible. It didn't feel that awkward in school, so we can use it now too.
    • toper-centage 6y ago
      You can't in Google meet when there are more than a couple people, because meet refuses to show all participants.
      • icebraining 6y ago
        It now supports up to 49 people: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/49-people-tile-view-see-yourself-google-meet.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/49-people-tile-...
    • redisman 6y ago
      This depends heavily on what layout everyone is using. We usually have a screenshare taking 90% of the space and if we have cameras on then most video conference software seems to show random 3 people in a small tile somewhere while the rest are just hidden.
    • deleted 6y ago
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• test1235 6y ago
  You can "raise your hand" in MS Teams as a signal to everyone else
• slykar 6y ago
  Just raise your hand on the web cam. Move it closer to make it visible.
  • phailhaus 6y ago
    Unfortunately that doesn't scale, and requires everyone to have their video camera on.
    • genuine_smiles 6y ago
      > that doesn't scale Why not?
      • dividedbyzero 6y ago
        Can't fit arbitrarily large numbers of people on a laptop screen, it's way harder to pick up this kind of motion from a mosaic of small 2d tiles, and everyone needs their camera on which isn't always feasible (connection issues, privacy of others in a home office setting, etc.)
      • wffurr 6y ago
        Good luck noticing that in the grid of 16 people on your tiny laptop screen.
        • slykar 6y ago
          Did your in-person meetings ever had this many participants? If this many people needs to be involved, then I'll argue a meeting is a nonsense anyway. It would be extremely hard even in-person.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • slykar 6y ago
      You are trying to replace in-person meetings without using cameras? It scales pretty well to a reasonable amount of people. How many people do you need in a meeting? If you have meetings with more than 12 people, then you are probably holding a conference and your meetings suck anyway. A written announcement would work better.
• hashkb 6y ago
  "Raise hand" is an attempt to solve the right problem, but it doesn't solve it in a realistic way. Virtual meetings feel weird because we're all more Trumpy than we realize - in actuality nearly every speaker's turn ends with an impatient interruption by the next speaker. This just doesn't feel "natural" with the latency of a phone call or video conference. I know, it's cynical, but it's one reason we love to hate meetings - we never get to finish tal
• atoav 6y ago
  I think a big one is actually latency and framerate. If you have a low latency videosetup (e.g. SDI Cameras and two monitors) you can try out what real low latency feels like. This works soo much better already because you can react to one another's mimic expression etc.
  • phailhaus 6y ago
    Unfortunately, that requires the end user to update their hardware. We have to live with the reality that people are not going to have low-latency setups, and design with that in mind. Everybody wins!
    • Cytobit 6y ago
      >We have to live with the reality that people are not going to have low-latency setups, and design with that in mind. Or we can live with the reality that some people will shell out for low-latency setups. There is room for both.
      • phailhaus 6y ago
        If your video conferencing platform _requires_ all participants to have low-latency setups, you are going for a very niche market. I'm talking about fundamental design changes we can bake into the general-purpose video conferencing apps that exist today, such as Teams, Hangouts/Meet, and Zoom.
  • dgoldstein0 6y ago
    latency in audio is definitely a big deal. I've definitely had the experience many times of starting to talk a second or two after someone else finishes, only to find someone else had started talking - and all this takes is maybe 500ms of delay to become super noticable. I've also found it extremely noticable when someone is screen sharing, and their screen share lags behind their audio several seconds often. If they are going through an interface fast, it can be hard to tell what they are referencing on their screen.
• therockspush 6y ago
  Agreed, but the thing that makes it "weird" for me is that anytime people stop talking in a zoom meeting it becomes dead air that people feel compelled to fill up. Natural breaks in the conversation don't work virtually right now.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • theshrike79 6y ago
    Dead air is a cultural issue. Some cultures (Americans) can't handle silence and perceive it as awkward.
  • wj 6y ago
    In my mind that means the agenda has been covered and it is time to wrap the meeting up.
• baud147258 6y ago
  > * We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to speak There is a raise hand button in teams. But as all our meetings are small enough, we never used it, so I don't know how useful it is
  • gelert 6y ago
    Speaking as a masters student who's had a lot of seminars through teams it is a fairly good solution. However, it requires effective moderation - the situation is still lacking in social cues.
  • TheCraiggers 6y ago
    > There is a raise hand button in teams. But as all our meetings are small enough, we never used it, so I don't know how useful it is Not all that useful really. The icon is small and gets easily missed. Also, when you're presenting, you can't see it at all which is mind-blowingly stupid to me. If there was ever a time I want to know if somebody has a question, it's when I'm in lecture mode and can't see people's faces.
• himinlomax 6y ago
  It's not just primitives, but more generally power features are lacking in all packages I've used. For instance, the most basic tool used in audio production is a vu-meter. On my Linux workstation, I keep the Gnome sound settings window open to check the gain. I understand you want the experience to be as automated as possible, but in large meetings it would be extremely useful for at least one admin type participant to have access to tools to diagnose sound issues. Same for layout, I don't understand why there's no way to force a particular layout. In Webex, you can't seem to be able to view chat and video at the same time, which is idiotic. Just sharing an URL is cumbersome.
• enkid 6y ago
  For your first point, how is that different from the "raise hand" button?
  • phailhaus 6y ago
    As I outlined elsewhere in the thread, a "raise hand" button is way too bulky since it's essentially a "request the floor" button. When you're talking naturally with a group of people, you don't submit formal requests for the floor; you simply lean in and everyone subconsciously acknowledges the fact that you intend to say something. The speaker can naturally cede, or you can jump in at a suitable pause. Or you can back off entirely and that's fine too! The simplest way to accomplish this is through push-to-talk. Since you have to push a button before you can speak, the UI can highlight your speaker tile and allow others to acknowledge your intent. It's much more fluid and natural than formally "raising your hand" and then having to rescind it if you decide to back off. The point is to provide low-level primitives that can become almost reflexive parts of video chats.
    • enkid 6y ago
      But zoom has push to talk and indications that you are unmuted, so I still don't quite get what you are talking about. That's ok.
      • phailhaus 6y ago
        Push-to-talk is necessary but not sufficient: you need to actually light up the square and move that speaker up so everyone notices that they intend to speak. Not sure if Zoom does this. Hiding a little "mute" icon in the corner is not good enough, we need to bake this functionality deep into the UI so that it becomes a natural and reflexive part of meetings. Zoom doesn't share layouts across all participants, which is a big problem too.