Gazing into the future of eye contact
Friday, 13 June 2025 ()
Humans need eye contact. It can make people feel closer, more honest, and more respected. When people share eye contact, their brains show similar activity, which helps them bond and understand each other. Eye contact also helps people focus better and remember more during conversations.
Eye contact is a human need. But it also offers big business benefits.
Brain scans show that eye contact activates parts of the brain linked to reading others’ feelings and intentions, including the fusiform gyrus, medial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. These brain regions help people figure out what others are thinking or feeling, which we all need for trusting business and work relationships.
A century and a half ago, all business meetings and work-related conversations with co-workers took place in person, face-to-face. Then phones entered the workplace. Email took off in the 1990s. Skype started video calls in 2003 and Zoom launched in 2011. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced nearly all work online, and rocketed Zoom into prominence. In 2025, most business meetings now happen via video calls.
From an eye contact perspective, video calls seem like they should be better than old-school phone calls. But they’re not.
Standard Zoom and other video calls make real eye contact impossible. The camera sits above or beside the screen, so when you look at someone’s face on your screen, you are not looking into the camera. If you look into the camera to simulate eye contact, you can’t see the other person’s face or reactions. This means both people always appear to be looking away, even if they are trying to pay attention. It is not just awkward — it changes how people feel and behave.
On a phone call, you don’t have visual information about the other person’s attention. But on a video call, the visual information tells you they’re not paying attention to you, even when they are.
Over the decades, we’ve slowly lost the benefits of eye contact, including better honesty, trust, bonding, focus, and memory.
But what technology has taken away, technology is bringing back.
*HP Dimension*
The world recently took two big leaps forward in the quest for remote eye contact. The first such advance comes from HP and Google.
HP
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