LookAtChat: Visualizing Gaze Awareness for Remote Small-Group Conversations
This addresses the challenge of remote communication for users of videoconferencing systems by enhancing gaze awareness, though it is incremental as it builds on existing eye-tracking technology.
The authors tackled the problem of missing nonverbal cues like gaze and spatial information in video conferences by introducing LookAtChat, a web-based system that uses real-time eye-tracking to visualize gaze awareness in small-group conversations, with findings from a user study (N=20) showing improved conversation quality.
Video conferences play a vital role in our daily lives. However, many nonverbal cues are missing, including gaze and spatial information. We introduce LookAtChat, a web-based video conferencing system, which empowers remote users to identify gaze awareness and spatial relationships in small-group conversations. Leveraging real-time eye-tracking technology available with ordinary webcams, LookAtChat tracks each user's gaze direction, identifies who is looking at whom, and provides corresponding spatial cues. Informed by formative interviews with 5 participants who regularly use videoconferencing software, we explored the design space of gaze visualization in both 2D and 3D layouts. We further conducted an exploratory user study (N=20) to evaluate LookAtChat in three conditions: baseline layout, 2D directional layout, and 3D perspective layout. Our findings demonstrate how LookAtChat engages participants in small-group conversations, how gaze and spatial information improve conversation quality, and the potential benefits and challenges to incorporating gaze awareness visualization into existing videoconferencing systems.