How empathy and creativity can re-humanise videoconferencing | Aeon Essays

It turns out that today’s video conferencing technology doesn’t emulate how people interact with others in person.

There’s a real opportunity for a next generation of video conference applications to fill these holes. These new products will begin to address issues such as: How do you shake hands? Exchange business cards? Pick up on the environment around the speaker? Notice the non-verbal cues?

If you’ve ever been to a virtual event or webinar, you know many of them can be terrible experiences. They’re one-sided, impersonal, and disengaging.

It could be said that the success of our human future requires the pursuit of narrative, reflection and empathy. To be sure, we can move in that direction through education, civic discourse and therapy. But if the design of our digital technologies helped us get to where we are, then design can also help get us somewhere better. Indeed, there are a

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The thing that I find most beautiful about technology generally is the possibility that we could use it to come up with a different way of seeing people, and a way to be more compassionate to one another, and we can use it to simulate what that might look like.

The goal of the metaverse is not to build technology for people to interact with; but rather, build technology for people to interact with each otherSpatial audio and eye contact technology are just two features to drastically improve on current video meeting technology, for exampleEstablishing a presence is the most difficult problem