Mistrusting your collaboration system

John Canny, EE/CS professor at Berkeley, said it well yesterday at our demo fair -- "The vendors are all busy selling Eye Candy, the High Definition screens for Video Conferencing, while ignoring Eye Gaze which is the most important single ingredient in effective communication."

I had opened the conference by asserting that every single system today on the market, with some minor exceptions in the HP Halo system and "the sweet spot" for Cisco Telepresence, builds subconscious mistrust, because they all have optics that nearly completely precludes looking the other person in the eye. Every culture on the globe, and virtually all animal species as well, use eye gaze for engagement and trust establishment. Every system that disbars eye contact creates a barrier to effective communication.

Jeremy Bailenson's opening keynote elaborated on my assertion; twelve speakers during the day affirmed the point, and the evening demos clearly established the problem, as well as some suggested technical solutions.

But Tuesday afternoon, LiveSize presented at the Sun Microsystems' sponsored MediaX Spring Lecture series, and said High Definition was the key, and that users "quickly" adjust to the lack of eye contact. Suzie Wu at HP confidently told Harlyn Baker, on the original HP Halo research team, that "people integrate the perceived view". And this afternoon, the Cisco and HP tours will allow the conference participants to form their own judgments.

Make no mistake -- these systems are awesome in many respects, and represent substantial improvement in capability (and sometimes cost) over anything previously available. But they ignore basic human psychology in dramatically important ways. It would be wonderful to imagine that the teams at the key companies -- Cisco, HP, Polycom, Tandberg, LifeSize, and the interesting newcomer, Vidyo -- would be putting key research into these subtle but vital aspects. Alas, the evidence is otherwise.