The ability to establish and sustain eye contact is a prerequisite for effective communication. Unfortunately, eye contact is difficult to preserve in remote collaboration that relies on videoconferencing, mixed reality, or virtual reality technologies. Before proceeding with the design of remote collaboration systems that provide adequate eye contact, an important preliminary question is how good does eye contact have to be for a remote collaborator to not feel that their interlocutor is not making eye contact. This paper presents a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) study with N = 139 participants that measured the lateral detection threshold for lack of eye contact. The findings suggest that a person sitting in front of a laptop has to have a fixation point within 1.5 cm (or 1.43 \(^\circ \) ) of the laptop’s video camera for their remote interlocutor to not perceive the lack of eye contact.