Video conference environment using representative eye-gaze motion of remote participants

In multi-participant conversation, speaker and listener pay attention to all participants to carry out smooth turn-taking. However, in video conversation it is difficult to perceive the timing of when to take turns talking because participants cannot perceive each other's eye-gaze. Consequently, one participant often misses the sign of when another person wants to speak, and continues to speak longer than appropriate. Considering this problem, in this study we propose a video-conference environment in which a robot symbolizes and unifies the eye-gaze motion of several participants. As a result of an experiment to investigate its efficacy and usefulness, it was suggested that the proposed video-conference environment suppresses inappropriate speech compared with a general video-conversation environment.