A multiple person eye contact (MPEC) teleconferencing system

A novel method of providing eye-contact for multiple participants in a teleconferencing system is presented. This method proposes a simple idea to fulfil the requirement of eye contact, for two or more local and remote participants simultaneously, by using half mirrors and cameras placed at the common points of the extended lines of gaze of each participant. In contrast to the commonly available one to one eye contact video phone systems, which also use half mirrors, the proposed system has the advantage of serving more than one person at a given location, hence named the multiple person eye contact (MPEC) teleconferencing system. We observed the resultant images by using a preliminary experiment and also building a prototype system. The results from both of these experiments proved the merits of the proposed idea