The impact of eye gaze on communication using humanoid avatars.pdf

The Impact of Eye Gaze on Communication using Humanoid Avatars Maia Garau +, Mel Slater +, Simon Bee * 1, Martina Angela Sasse + + Department of Computer Science University College London (UCL) Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, UK {m.garau | m.slater | a.sasse}@cs.ucl.ac.uk * MLB3/7 BT Labs. Martlesham Heath Ipswich, IP5 3RE, UK ABSTRACT In this paper we describe an experiment designed to investigate the importance of eye gaze in humanoid avatars representing people engaged in conversation. We compare responses to dyadic conversations in four mediated conditions: video, audio-only, and two avatar conditions. The avatar conditions differed only in their treatment of eye gaze. In the random-gaze condition the avatar’s head and eye animations were unrelated to conversational flow. In the informed-gaze condition, they were related to turn-taking during the conversation. The head animations were tracked and the eye animations were inferred from the audio stream. Our comparative analysis of 100 post-experiment questionnaires showed that the random-gaze avatar did not improve on audio-only communication. The informed-gaze avatar significantly outperformed the random-gaze model and also outperformed audio-only on several response measures. We conclude that an avatar whose gaze behaviour is related to the conversation provides a marked improvement on an avatar that merely exhibits liveliness. Keywords Avatars, gaze, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), computer-mediated communication (CMC), mediated communication, nonverbal behaviours. INTRODUCTION This paper describes an experiment to assess the extent to which avatars are important in enhancing the quality of communication in remote meetings. In particular we consider the importance of gaze behaviour in increasing the expressive potential of avatars. Research in videoconferencing has been driven by the premise that adding visual information should increase the communicative bandwidth of mediated interaction [23]. Though