Designing Gaze-Adaptive Visualizations of Mutual Gaze for Video Meetings

Eye contact is an essential non-verbal cue in human communication. Due to the absence of gaze information in video meetings, however, team members are not able to perceive and anticipate eye contact in this remote setting. To solve this problem, we explore how episodes of mutual gaze can be visualized in video meeting systems using eye tracking technology and report preliminary findings by conducting the first cycle of a design science research project. The preliminary results of our study indicate that gaze-adaptive visualization of mutual gaze increases trust between remote team members in video meetings. However, participants also indicated that the visualization might be distracting. Future studies should therefore investigate the effect on team performance more closely.