Why you never make eye contact on video calls
Video calls have a structural problem that no amount of effort solves: the camera is in one place and the face you're looking at is in another. Look at them and you appear to look away; look at the camera and you can't read the room.
You can't eliminate that trade-off, but you can shrink it a lot.
The parallax problem, stated plainly
Your webcam sits above the screen. The other person's face appears somewhere on the screen below it. The distance between those two points is the angle your gaze is off by, and the viewer reads it as looking slightly down or away.
The larger your monitor and the closer you sit, the worse the angle gets — which is why the problem is often worst on the setups people spent the most money on.
Fixes that cost nothing
- Drag the speaker's window to the top of the screen, immediately under the camera.
- Shrink the meeting window rather than running it full-screen, so your eyes stay in a small area.
- Move your self-view directly under the camera too — or hide it, since watching yourself is its own distraction.
- Sit further back. Distance shrinks the angle exactly as it does with a teleprompter.
- Look at the camera deliberately for the moments that matter — your opening line, a question, a commitment — rather than trying to hold it constantly.
Hardware that helps
An external webcam mounted low, just above the meeting window, beats a laptop camera pointing up at you from desk level. Laptop cameras are doubly bad: the angle is wide and it's an unflattering upward shot.
Raising the laptop to eye height on a stand fixes the second problem and part of the first.
Software correction on live calls
Some platforms correct gaze in real time. NVIDIA Broadcast does it for anyone with an RTX GPU and works as a virtual camera across most conferencing apps. Apple's FaceTime has an Eye Contact setting on supported devices. These are convenient, but they're blunt — real-time correction has no chance to be selective about which frames to touch, so a hard stare is a common side effect.
Use them, but check how you look in a recording before relying on them for anything high-stakes.
Recorded video is a different problem
Live calls have to be fixed live. Anything recorded — async updates, Loom messages, webinar intros, sales videos — can be corrected afterwards instead, with much better results, because the tool can analyse the whole clip and skip frames where correction would look forced.
If a video matters enough to script, it's worth correcting in post rather than trusting real-time processing.
A note on trying too hard
Constant, unbroken camera stare is worse than occasional drift. Real conversation involves looking away to think — people expect it, and its absence is unsettling. Aim for camera contact at the moments that carry weight, and let the rest be natural.