Sharing Emotion by Displaying a Partner Near the Gaze Point in a Telepresence System

Seungwon Kim, Mark Billinghurst, Gun A. Lee, Mitchell Norman, Weidong Huang, Jian He

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the effect of showing a remote partner close to user gaze point in a teleconferencing system. We implemented a gaze following function in a teleconferencing system and investigate if this improves the user's feeling of emotional interdependence. We developed a prototype system that shows a remote partner close to the user's current gaze point and conducted a user study comparing it to a condition displaying the partner fixed in the corner of a screen. Our results showed that showing a partner close to their gaze point helped users feel a higher level of emotional interdependence. In addition, we compared the effect of our method between small and big displays, but there was no significant difference in the users' feeling of emotional interdependence even though the big display was preferred.