Eye-to-eye contact for life-sized videoconferencing

Videoconferencing systems available for end users do not allow for eye-to-eye contact between participants. The different locations of video camera and video display make it impossible to directly look into each others eyes. This issue is known as the lack of mutual gaze. Combined with a lack of a life-sized video image of the communication partner videoconferencing becomes an artificial experience leading to decreased communication quality, empathy and trust. In this work, we present life-sized videoconferencing solution supporting mutual gaze and report on the experiences made with our system in empirical evaluations.