- As it turns out, eye contact is a big fucking deal. However, it's also an incredibly expensive and cumbersome problem.
Are you a fan of Errol Morris? He invented a device he call the interrotron to solve this problem when he conducts interviews. Is a system that projects his face onto the lens of a camera, so that he can maintain eye contact with his interview subjects, while they're actually looking at the camera and not him. He feels that it gives a more intimate view of his subjects to the audience, a view which is normally lost in documentaries. Coincidentally, he used to make commercials for Apple, too; not sure if he ever prodded them on the topic of video chat, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I've seen that. It's less of a problem in an interview situation because the conversation is necessarily 1-sided with augmentation. When we do those interviews we can keep nagging the subject to look at the camera; Morris's approach basically lets him misappropriate a teleprompter. We've been putting those on iPads through split screens since iPads came out.