A new study finally explains why online meetings feel so exhausting

Feeling exhausted from video calls? A recent study found what may be the main cause of “Zoom fatigue” and why online meetings tend to feel so awkward.

According to research published late last week in journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, important visual cues we use to communicate in person can become misleading or disruptive over video calls.

“This whole sophisticated dance that two people and their visual systems play when they communicate in the real world is just disrupted,” said study author Nikolaus Troje, a Canada research chair in reality research and a professor studying visual perception at York University. “It doesn’t work anymore.”

Perhaps most disruptive is the mistranslation of eye contact over video, he said.

“What you are experiencing now is two different things,” Troje said during a Zoom interview with the Star. “One is that we can never have eye contact — you feel being looked at if I look into the camera … but I don’t see you.”

Likewise, if Troje looked into my eyes on the screen, I’d feel he was staring at my chin due to the positioning of his webcam.

That’s not to single Zoom out — the effect is present in all modern video platforms, Troje said. His study used Zoom as a stand-in for video calling software due to the app’s ubiquity.

“The other thing is that there’s no way to correct for that disparity. I can’t go down and capture your gaze. No matter where I am, you’re always looking too low,” he continued.

During in-person conversations, we do much of our communicating with our eyes, Troje explained. Eye contact helps negotiate turn-taking when speaking, allows us to gauge understanding or interest, establishes trust and rapport and more.

“Eye contact doesn’t mean that we stare at each other the whole time. We play a sophisticated, dynamic game — and that’s the problem with (video calls),” Troje said.

Even though these visual cues are lost during phone conversations, our brains are able to account for their absence and still enjoy a productive call. During video conferences, however, we may not be able to control our reflexive responses to misleading visual cues like false eye contact, according to Troje’s paper.

“People have tried to solve it by using computer graphics to change the orientation of the eyes or change the orientation of the head,” Troje said. “But it wouldn’t help because then you would you feel you’re being looked at all the time.”

Another key piece missing in video calls is the lack of motion parallax — the slight changes in perspective we experience as we move positions, that allow us to judge distance and depth. Over video, this sense of perspective is lost; the person we’re speaking to and the objects in their background appear as a flat image, Troje’s paper reads.

In order to address these issues, Troje’s lab is working on a new video conferencing platform that functions like a “window” into the other person’s room, he said. Using off-the-shelf tech, their current prototypes function by tracking the position of users’ heads and updating the view of the other person accordingly, in real time.

Troje’s team has since filed a pending patent and are working with companies interested in licensing their tech, though he was unable go into specifics at this stage.

The negative impacts of video calls have been well documented. In 2020, a study found students rated Zoom poorly and said it had a negative impact on their learning. That same year, another study discovered video conference job interviewees received lower performance ratings than in-person counterparts.

One 2021 study documented the prevalence of Zoom fatigue and theorized that close-up eye gaze, increased cognitive load, heightened self-evaluation from constantly staring at oneself and limited mobility contributed to video call exhaustion.

As the technology improves, Troje’s paper posits that we’ll soon see a new generation of video conferencing platforms expand “into areas where current solutions were not yet able to replace face-to-face communication.”

What comes next remains to be seen.

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