The impact of eye gaze on communication using humanoid avatars

  • Authors:

  • Maia Garau;Mel Slater;Simon Bee;Martina Angela Sasse

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL), Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, UK;Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL), Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, UK;Parametric Technology Corp., 19 Apex Court, Woodlands, Almondsbury Park, Bristol, BS32 4JT, UK and MLB3/7, BT Labs., Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, IP5 3RE, UK;Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL), Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In this paper we describe an experiment designed to investigate the importance of eye gaze in humanoid avatar's 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 avatars 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.