Some Implications of Eye Gaze Behavior and Perception for the Design of Immersive Telecommunication Systems

A feature of standard video-mediated Communication systems (VMC) is that participants see into each other´s spaces from the viewpoint of a camera. Consequently, participants´ capacity to use the spatially-based resources that exist in co-located settings (eg the production and comprehension of pointing and eye gaze direction) can be compromised. Whilst positioning cameras close to displays, or switching or interpolating between multiple cameras to provide appropriately aligned views can reduce this problem, an alternative paradigm is the use of immersive projection technology to locate participants within an immersive collaborative virtual environment (ICVE), in which remote participants appear as 3D graphical representations. Two approaches toward representation of remote participants in ICVEs have been studied: embodied avatars animated using participants´ tracked body motion, and vision-based techniques that reconstruct 3D models from multiple streams of live video input. Drawing on empirical evaluations of an avatar-based ICVE system that both captures and displays eye-movement, together with an examination of previous research into gaze, we provide a specification of gaze practices and the cues used in the perception of gaze that should be supported in ICVEs. We delineate some of the challenges for vision-based ICVE and discuss the potential for combining different approaches in the development of such systems.