Evaluation Experiment on Eye-to-Eye Contact in Remote Communication with Tiled Displays Environments

In remote communication over the Internet, we consider that non-verbal communications such as eye-to-eye contact in the real world in addition to the existence of co- researchers by transmission of a video in real scene is important. However, it is difficult to realize communication by eye-to-eye contact because camera which used to shoot participant in remote communication is located at the side or top of display equipment. In this paper, we have constructed the scalable tiled displays environment in two points via LAN. In these environment, we have conducted experimental verification on the effect for eye-to-eye contact by changing the position of camera on frame of LCDs on tiled displays. In these experiments, we have found to have a high tendency to discriminate gazer's direction of eyes in the case that camera is located at close position for direction that an estimator faces on the front. In addition, the accuracy rate in case that camera is bottom position became lower than case of top position. From above results, we have showed experimentally that each participant enables to turn direction of eyes to a camera in a natural way become important factor for realization of eye-to-eye contact in remote communication.