Eye Contact Correction: Redirecting the eyes to look at the camera

I agree with this.

I don't actually want the person I'm talking to to appear to be looking directly into my eyes because it's weird - it means they're looking at the camera and not at me on the screen, talking to them.

Somehow I've apparently made a different adjustment to this than most people. My therapist was commenting on it the other day, how I do look directly into the camera when I want her to see me as making "eye contact," rather than looking directly at where I see her eyes.

She's taking this as an autistic adaptation NT people are less likely to make, like my gestures are practiced and tailored for the sake of the other, not my own sake. I want to "look in her eyes" to make a point, because that's one of the ways you show people you're making an important point, not to see how she's responding to what I'm saying.

I haven't done any of it on purpose. It's apparently just how I've adapted to the weird communication space of having a gap between actually looking at someone's eyes and being seen to be looking at someone's eyes.

Indeed - intense eye contact can be unsettling, even without the additional information gleaned from knowing that the other party has chosen to look at the camera.

Eye contact is a subtle and important dynamic in human interaction (to the point where it has been suggested that we have white sclera, while our closest ape cousins do not, as an adaptation in support of easily detecting eye contact.) In a meeting, that includes third parties seeing who is making eye contact with whom.

The systems being discussed here are too simple to restore this natural dynamic, and it is not clear to me that always-on eye contact correction[1] is free of unintended and undesirable consequences - for example, in some circumstances, it might ramp up the tension in a discussion, or it might help someone who is dissembling.

[1] Even with random look-aways, I suspect - in actual conversation, look-aways are often correlated with what's going on in the discussion.

I don't want to be mean to your therapist, but really?

Understanding camera eyelines counts as autistic now?

You're fine doing that. Sorry, but that comment she made really sent me.

Reminds me of how the film department forced the digital artists to take a Cinematography and lighting classed irl so their final project renders would improve.

> because it's weird

I don't get many opportunities to express my exasperation with the paradigm of the youtube content creator's thousand video cuts per spoken sentence, but hell, in the same way, I think it's just $#@%ing weird.

It might be one thing if I had done it on purpose, because I was thinking about camera eyelines. But it wasn't deliberate. I subconsciously choose based on how another person will see me, because I don't really expect to get a whole lot of information from seeing them. Something about this being a type of "masking" in autistic women, trying harder to get my social cues across to others, but not expecting myself to receive them.

I think maybe I have "trauma masquerading as ASD," because the symptoms are subjectively improving as I learn to down-regulate my nervous system, but then I don't much care what label gets put on why I'm weird. I'm much more interested in figuring out what to do with the different ways I'm weird. I'm old enough that I can't think of ways formal diagnosis would help me, so I'd rather assume each challenge is treatable until I find out that it isn't.