Eye contact calculator
When you read text below a camera, your eyes drop by an angle, and past a few degrees viewers see it. Set how far away the camera is and where the line you read sits.
9.9° below the lens
Past the limit where viewers still see eye contact: most will see you look down to read.
How the angle is worked out
The angle your eyes drop is the arctangent of two lengths: how far below the lens the line sits, divided by how far the camera is from your eyes. Doubling the distance roughly halves the angle, which is why the same notes look worse on a phone held close than on a monitor across the desk.
How close the text needs to be
To stay under about 5.5° (where viewers in published studies stop seeing eye contact) and near 2° (which a 2024 study found reads as eye contact best), the line you read must sit within:
| Camera distance | Within 5.5° of the lens | About 2° below the lens |
|---|---|---|
| 30 cm (12 in) | 2.9 cm (1.1 in) | 1.0 cm |
| 40 cm (16 in) | 3.9 cm (1.5 in) | 1.4 cm |
| 50 cm (20 in) | 4.8 cm (1.9 in) | 1.7 cm |
| 60 cm (24 in) | 5.8 cm (2.3 in) | 2.1 cm |
| 75 cm (30 in) | 7.2 cm (2.8 in) | 2.6 cm |
| 100 cm (39 in) | 9.6 cm (3.8 in) | 3.5 cm |
The middle of a phone screen is roughly 6 to 8 cm below the front camera, and the middle of a laptop screen roughly 10 cm below its camera. At normal distances both are well past the limit.
Where the limits come from
Studies of gaze in video found that viewers stop perceiving eye contact when the speaker looks more than about 5.5° below the camera or 4.5° above it, and that people are less sensitive to gaze below the camera than above or beside it. A 2024 study found that looking about 2° below the lens reads as eye contact even better than looking straight into it. Treat the numbers as guides: lighting, glasses, head movement and how long you hold a glance all matter.
Sources: Gao and others, Don't Look at the Camera: Achieving Perceived Eye Contact, Journal of Vision, 2024; Chen, Leveraging the Asymmetric Sensitivity of Eye Contact for Videoconference, CHI 2002.
What to do with the number
- Move the text up. The biggest gain is putting the line you read right under the camera.
- Move the camera back. More distance shrinks the angle, at the cost of smaller text.
- Keep lines short. Long lines make your eyes travel sideways, which shows as much as looking down.
- Read one line at a time. Your eyes stay in one place instead of scanning ahead.
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EyePrompt keeps the line you read in a narrow band right under the camera on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and after each front-camera take shows how much of it your eyes stayed near the lens. How it works
Questions people ask
How far below the camera can you look and still make eye contact?
Studies of gaze in video put the limit at about 5.5 degrees below the camera, and a 2024 study found about 2 degrees below the lens reads as eye contact best. On a phone 40 cm away, that means keeping the line you read within about 4 cm of the camera.
Why does reading from the middle of the screen look like reading?
The middle of a phone screen is 6 to 8 cm below the front camera. At a normal distance that drops your eyes 8 to 15 degrees, well past the 5.5 degrees where viewers stop seeing eye contact.
Does it help to hold the phone farther away?
Yes. The angle is the offset divided by the distance, so doubling the distance roughly halves it, at the cost of smaller text.