A teleconferencing system capable of multiple person eye contact (MPEC) using half mirrors and cameras placed at common points of extended lines of gaze

In this paper a novel method of providing eye contact for multiple participants in a teleconferencing system is presented. This method proposes a simple idea to fulfill the requirement for 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 of 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 multiple person eye contact (MPEC) teleconferencing system. We observed the resultant images by using a preliminary experiment and also by building a prototype system. The results from both of these experiments proved the merits of the proposed idea. One of the main features of this system is that, it gives any participant, a feeling of “being looked at” if any remote participant is actually gazing at him. On the other hand if none of the remote participants are looking at him, then he gets the feeling of “not being looked at” which is also extremely important for effective inter personal communication. Furthermore, this system preserves the spatial continuity of neighboring participants, since all the participants at a given location are captured by each video camera