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

What is the modern obsession with video calls?

I have been working for a company which allowed full remote work without any qualms since before COVID and nobody did video calls back then. Since we end up on site in secure environments we also just get told to disable the camera in the BIOS as part of our laptop hardening.

For things like bi-annual meetings with your manager you would go into your local office.

I don't remotely get it, either. Most group calls I'm in involve one person presenting something and we're watching that, not each other. For things like a one-on-one call with my manager, we just talk. Shit, sometimes we even talk on the phone, but usually still a computer. He might be wearing no pants for all I care. I usually have a cat on me and am probably laying flat. If it's before 10 AM, because my wife goes to work so late, she's probably walking around naked behind me and nobody needs to be seeing that.

My company was also 100% remote from its start, even before Covid.

As others have stated, it's also just unnerving to have people making nonstop eye contact or staring at any part of your body at all, even if it isn't your eyes. Maybe 90s Los Angeles was an abnormally shitty place to grow up because of the gang activity, but this is the kind of thing kids started fights over all the time. Robert DeNiro's most famous movie scene is about how threatening it feels to have someone looking at you.

This isn't even unique to humans. When you regularly interact with animals, you're taught to look away and not hold direct eye contact because they'll see it as a challenge or threat. I've learned to do this with my own cats to make them more at ease. You learn to blink, narrow your eyes, look to the side.

Not only that but the obsession with higher and higher resolution video calls. Lets upgrade the laptop cams. No wait lets use a mirrorless camera and a ring light. Meanwhile the upload speed from your home isp is still early 2000s tier speeds and zoom downsamples you to 144p.

Also a fully remote company worker since pre-COVID, and I vastly prefer calls with the video on. It's the norm at our company. Facial expressions convey enormous amounts of information. Also our team silently claps for people which is admittedly quite silly but hey, we like it.

I'm rarely on calls without video, but when I am I find it jarring when voices just appear out of the ether with only a little flashing icon to indicate who it is I'm listening to.

To each their own!

having worked with half a remote team from Poland which also never turned the camera on I can tell you that faces provide a lot better method of person disambiguation for Germans than polish names. (no disrespect to the Polish language or people, my lack of knowledge therof is to blame here)

It’s bizarre, I recently had an interview where the 2 people before and myself just did voice + coderpad over teams, no video. Then the next person, also with no video requested I open up my camera, I politely asked that they do the same if were to do it and they refused, so I refused. They said the interview was over. I was like fine, have a nice day to their very rude ending of the interview. It’s strange how people expect to have all the power (or video?)in these situations. The hiring manager called me later and got my side, then apologized and asked if we could set up the 3rd interview with another team member, but I politely declined and went on about my day.