Eye Contact in Leisure Video Conferencing

This paper presents systems which enable eye contact in leisure video conferencing. The proposed solutions include a software based and a hardware based approach. Two experiments were conducted to test the performance of the systems by measuring the users\' sense of presence. The results showed that both solutions succeeded in establishing eye contact but there was no direct indication of an increase in presence with respect to the conventional setup. The hardware solution induced a greater sense of presence and established a greater and more natural eye contact perception than the software solution.