Googly Eyes: Exploring Effects of Displaying User’s Eyes Outward on a Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display on User Experience

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) in virtual reality (VR) occlude the upper face of the wearing users, leading to decreased nonverbal communication cues toward outside users. In this paper, we discuss Googly Eyes, a high-fidelity prototype that displays an illustration of the HMD-wearing user’s eyes in real-time in front of an HMD. We explored the effects of the Googly Eyes on the user experience of non-HMD users. For this, we designed and developed a collaborative asymmetrical co-located task performed by an HMD-wearing user and a non-HMD (tablet) user, and we conducted a between-subjects user study where we compared the Googly Eyes with a baseline HMD experience without any external eye depiction. In this paper, we discuss the system, task, user study details, and results along with implications for future studies.