Gaze Awareness for Video-Conferencing: A Software Approach

reness has more abstract social value: People who use frequent eye contact are perceived as more attentive, friendly, cooperative, confident, mature, and sincere than those who avoid it. Despite the obvious importance of directed gaze, most videoconferencing systems make it impossible for participants to make eye contact or even to determine where or at what the other participants are looking. This loss of gaze awareness has a profound impact on communication, and may in fact be a contributing factor in the failure of videoconferencing to meet with its long-anticipated success (for more on this, see the sidebar, "Videoconferencing Research" on page 28). The lack of gaze awareness in typical videoconferencing systems stems from the fact that when participants look at each other, they stare into their displays rather than into the camera, which is typically mounted above, below, or beside the display. Unless people look directly into the camera, you will never perceive them as ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: IEEEMM
• Authors: Jim Gemmell, Kentaro Toyama, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Thomas Kang, Steven M. Seitz
• Keywords: Eye Contact, Gaze, IEEEMM 2000, Videoconferencing