Where to look on a video call

The camera or the faces

Your instinct is to look at the person you are talking to, which means looking at their face on your screen. The trouble is that the camera sits above the screen, so while you are looking at their eyes you are actually looking a little below your own lens. To them it reads as though your gaze is dropped and pointed slightly away. Look straight into the lens instead and you give them clean eye contact, but now you cannot see their face or their reactions. Each option costs you something, which is why it feels awkward. No setting removes the tension, so the goal is a way of working with it.

What the other side actually sees

Here is the mechanic that makes sense of the whole thing. When you look into the lens, everyone on the call feels looked at, because the camera sends your gaze straight out toward them. When you look at their face on the screen, your eyes read as pointed slightly down, which comes across as looking away or glancing at your notes. The gap between the lens and the face on your screen is small on a laptop and larger on a big monitor, and the bigger the gap, the more looking at the screen reads as looking away. So the camera is your eye contact, and the screen is where you gather everything else, their expressions, their nods, the room.

A rule that actually works

You cannot stare into the lens for a whole call, and you should not try, because a fixed stare into a camera looks stranger than a natural glance. The rule that holds up is simple. Look into the lens when you speak, especially on your opening and your key points, so your own words land with eye contact. Look at their faces when you listen, so you can read them and they can see you paying attention. Speaking is when your gaze matters most to them, and listening is when their reactions matter most to you, so this split gives each moment the thing it needs. It is one of the quiet habits behind looking confident on video calls.

Shrink the gap with your setup

You can make the whole problem smaller by moving things closer together. Drag the window of whoever is speaking up to the top of your screen, right under the camera, so your natural gaze at their face already sits close to the lens. Raise your camera to eye level too, so you are looking straight ahead rather than down at it. On a laptop, a stand or a stack of books does the job. The camera check shows you live how your framing and eyeline actually read, so you can set it before a call rather than guessing mid-conversation.

Do not overthink it mid-call

Once your setup is sorted, stop managing your eyes and get back to the conversation. A real, engaged glance that meets the lens now and then beats a stiff, calculated stare every time. Presence comes from being genuinely with the other person, and the eye contact takes care of most of itself once the camera is at the right height and the important window sits near the lens.

Bloom watches your eyeline during a call and lets you know when your gaze has drifted off for too long, so you can meet the lens on the moments that matter without keeping score in your head.