Towards Enabling Eye Contact and Perspective Control in Video Conference

Abstract

Eye contact is an important part of in-person communication. However, in modern remote communication - video conference calls, non-verbal cues through eye contact are lost. This is because it is not possible to make eye contact in a video call; to make it look like a person is making an eye contact, the user has to look at the camera directly, but then this means that the user is not looking at the visual of the interlocutor on the screen. In our research, we aim to build a hardware and software system that helps the users to make eye contact in video conference and change their perspective, placing a moving camera behind a semi-transparent screen. The system keeps the position of camera right behind the remote user's eye position on screen tracked by a computer vision algorithm, so users will be able to make eye contact during the video call. We believe the system will lead to better user experience in remote conference calls. In this work, we share our motivation, design choices, the current progress, and a plan to evaluate the system.