The New Yorker had a recent and rather wonderfully whimsical article on Raold Dahl, best known for his brilliant, if curmudgeonly, kids’ books. A couple of sentences have a lesson for video camera use - or lack of it.

Dahl shared with George Orwell an acute sense of why small children often see
adults as unsightly or intimidating. “Part of the reason for the ugliness of
adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few
faces are at their best when seen from below,” Orwell wrote.

I’ve observed many times that one of the problems with video phones is that if
you hold them where it feels comfortable and natural, you’re going to
hold them somewhere around your stomach level. Which means that the video
captures you from below, resulting in even Kate Moss waifs looking more like Jabba the Hut.

This is especially bad news if you’re looking to use video for dating
applications, which seems to be the one last bastion of hope for this
white elephant right now. Who wants to look awful when looking for a date?

Maybe Dahl has the solution too:

Dahl once said that adults should get down on their knees for a week, in order
to remember what it’s like to live in a world in which the people with all the
power literally loom over you.

Maybe that’s what video phone designers should be doing……

Link via Kottke via BoingBoing.