Can video conferencing be (unintentionally) racist?
Reflections amid the ‘Teams Rooms stampede’…
As part of a series of short articles, Visual Displays' Director Greg Jeffreys discusses all things AV…
When consulting on lighting and room design for a global search engine company, many dark-skinned employees expressed discontent about how their faces appeared in video conferences. It’s a ubiquitous issue.
VC cameras have automatic exposure. People have widely varying skin colours - and thus Light Reflectance Values (LRVs). In a camera’s field of view (FOV), the background (which we technicians call ‘the wall’) fills a large but variable percentage of what it ‘sees’. If the wall is too reflective, even white, a dark human face has diminished chances of being transmitted down the wire in the form of high-quality video signal.
The colour and the reflectance value of the walls and room surfaces are mission-critical. It’s all there in AVIXA’s ‘RP-38-17 Lighting Performance for Small to Medium Sized Videoconferencing Rooms’.
This is not about spending money, as a ten quid tin of paint will fix it. It’s a pre-technology thing: things to get right before you go anywhere near all that bright shiny UC/VC equipment. It's also why these technology-enabled spaces must be treated holistically - they are fully co-dependent systems.
I’m unashamed about my bias as I’ve been writing and leading standards since we started. Use AVIXA standards judiciously and you can get it right, first time. Let me help you.
Posted: 13th December 2021