What is it about?
Video-conferencing is widespread but suffers from "zoom fatigue". One cause is the difficulty of understanding who is talking to who, and whose turn it is to talk next. It is hard for a user to gauge who the other users are looking at. Technologists are making a lot of progress on this problem. First, photorealistic avatars of users are being developed whose gaze (as seen on screen) can be redirected. Second, regular webcams with AI technology can detect quite accurately where a user is looking. Soon small-group video-conferencing should be possible around a virtual table, using just regular laptops -- no VR headsets required. In the meantime we wanted to test this concept ("Gazing Heads") by setting up a simulated round-table system, to see what small groups make of it, compared with a conventional ("Tiled View") system . The results are rather conclusive. Users find Gazing Heads more engaging and natural, and more social. Turn-taking is easier, and it feels more like being in the same room with the other users.
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Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Videoconferencing is becoming more and more significant as a way of tackling the climate crisis. It proved itself in the Covid pandemic as a compelling alternative to face to face meetings. As videoconferencing improves, for instance in the way described in the article, it should become more popular. It will more often be chosen as a resource-saving alternative to travel, and that will help increasingly with decarbonisation.
Perspectives
Setting up the Gazing Heads simulation, running the studies (recruiting 80 subjects then 20 hours lab time), and analysing the data have been substantial tasks. I have great admiration for my co-workers who bore the brunt of those challenges. The discussions that ensued, and the work to simplify and extract the essence of what we found, were fascinating. And I take satisfaction in making a potential contribution to climate mitigation, which is one of the big challenges of our era.
Andrew Blake
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Gazing Heads: Investigating Gaze Perception in Video-Mediated Communication, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, June 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3660343.
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