A Remote Multi-sites Communication System Providing Gaze Control by Body Movement

Various remote communication systems so far developed are still far away from the awareness of face-to-face communication. There may be several reasons. One of them may be due to the fact that even if a participant changes his/her position and posture, the pictures of other participants on the display does not change. Here, we regard a display window for remote communication as a real window and simulate communication through the real window. We propose a method of capturing the position and posture of each participant by an infrared sensor and reflecting it into the view of the others on their windows as if they were talking through the windows. This enables each participant to change the view of the other participants by changing his/her position and posture. We designed a remote communication system incorporating this feature, made a prototype and preliminary evaluated the feature.