As most office workers have shifted to working from home under quarantine, a sudden spotlight has been cast on the shortcomings of today’s video conferencing options. People isolated at home are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and a sense of disconnectedness. While many tech platforms talk about connection in their mission statements, no platform has fully succeeded at creating a sense of genuine presence — the sense that we are truly with other people. The options for video conferencing today are grim: inflexible, asocial, and visually dated. To move forward, these solutions, or wholly new ones, will need to embrace the importance of presence by supporting more flexible camera ecosystems, increasing caller visibility (in feeling as much as visuals), and seek out ways to communicate the idiosyncrasies that make being with someone feel real.

Utilities like Google Docs and Dropbox Paper today show how even platforms not primarily focused on synchronous conversation can become more social by showing your collaborators’ cursors and avatars to create a greater sense of connection. We don’t need visual cues that remind us that connecting via video vaguely resembles a tool we used to use called a telephone. By stripping those cues away, we help make the connections between each other feel more immediate.

Of all these early approaches, Skype was really the first to point the way to making presence a greater priority. It was one of the first platforms I ever used to video-call friends and family while traveling abroad. Those early calls look pixelated and rough now, but they were a leap forward in seeing, hearing and being near to someone.

Real presence is flexible

Mobile phones, and more recently smart home devices, catalyzed a new wave of video platforms just as cable internet had done before. Apple launched FaceTime. Google launched Hangouts. Ex-WebEx employees founded Zoom. Amazon, Facebook, and Google would all create smart home displays that leveraged cameras to make conversations more casual and seamless.

The world’s biggest social networks, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, built live video features and pushed them aggressively, in the process familiarizing most people with a new vocabulary of interactions based on real-time reactions and commenting. Pop-tech phenomena boomed around synchronous (Periscope) and asynchronous (Vine, Snapchat) video communication.

In gaming, Twitch built an entire subculture around live streaming video games. Professional gamers, Twitch celebrities, and eSports all became a thing. Discord built experiences around walkie-talkie style audio chat for teams of gamers.

These platforms all raised the bar in user experience. Not only did the diversity of devices lend itself to more flexible times and positions to make video calls, but they also encouraged video calls to feel more casual and friendly. When you can sit as you would with a friend in real life, you transcend a video chat toward a state of true presence in your conversation.