A humbly crowdsourced edit
"In Windows land, sometimes it can feel like everyone is a tester."
Microsoft celebrated the end of its Inspire conference and the release of its financials with a pantomime-like Windows 10 Insider update. At least as far as AMD-based PCs were concerned. The previous Dev Channel Insider build had been blocked for AMD-owning Windows Insiders. Microsoft reassured worried users that all would be …
What on earth is the point of such a thing?
If you want to be seen gazing at the camera, gaze at the camera. If you want the camera to pretend you're gazing at it, gaze at it, take a snap, and send that picture instead. It's telling no-one anything, just pointing out the uselessness of a live camera for many video conference situations.
Or is it just an aid to making bosses feel happy? Oh look, all of them watching me with dog-like devotion?
Either way, it's one more thing buggering up the real world...
I'm sure this will look just as natural as the non-Chroma Keyed background obfuscation/picture injection from Teams.
Where ears and the sides of your head get cut off when you turn your head and if you aren't fully bald or with a full head of hair... all sorts of weirdness is going on above you.
Awesome.
Oh and to answer your question on why... this is because with everyone WfH, they've come to realize that it's actually hard to talk TO a camera while trying to NOT focus on your return video feed or any number of other distractions going on. :)
I have disabled the camera on my laptop.
I am tired of seeing people waiting to be able to say something. There is a benefit in face-to-face communication, that I do not dispute, but when remote, honestly, I see no interest in watching four people silently stare, bored out their skulls, while the fifth takes the floor.
Remote viewing is useful for one-on-one conversations. For meetings, just make it a conference call.
Saves on bandwidth as well.
And would be solved in a second by the "Raise My Hand" feature which puts a flag on the speaker's screen so they know who's waiting to talk.
Most videoconferences don't actually need to show video for most participants at all. Two-way, you want both people to see each other. When there are more people and one's talking, maybe the previous speaker needs to be shown to the current but it already switches to the active speaker. Everyone else, that's just pissing bandwidth away.
That all depends on your setup. For a laptop that might be true. For a desktop with two monitors, there is no requirement that the camera is mounted over the monitor that is displaying your Teams window.
For many meetings, once you have read the text on the screen, there is no need to continue to stare that the text. I often change to watching the image boxes which makes make look like I'm looking down, not straight. This happens because I have 32" monitors and the camera is mounted on the top of the display.
If I look up at the camera, it is actually harder to pay attention to what is happening in the teams meeting.
Many seem to assume that users are using phones/laptops for meetings. There are millions (maybe 10's of millions) of desktops that do teleconferencing. Assuming anything about their cameras is a mistake.
I updated yesterday via https://uupdump.ml/ to 20175.1000, AMD 3900X. Though I am only on Insider since nested virtualization works with AMD since 19640, and to my surprise no problems at all. Currently it looks like nested with AMD will be in the 21H1 build, thanks COVID19... When I see the version numbers 20H2 will be 19042, a cowardly mini step from 19041 like they did from 1903 to 1909, again thanks COVID19.
20H1 got presented last night for my Dell Latitude notepad, it had been locked out since it's a Thunderbolt 3 machine, and once complete promptly stopped recognizing anything plugged into the Type-C/TB3 ports. Thinking whether waiting it out to make use of WSL-2 or reverting to 1909. Decisions, decisions.