Impact of simulated gaze gestures on social interaction for people with visual impairments

Gaze and eye contact have important social meanings in our daily lives. The sighted often uses gaze gestures in communication to convey nonverbal information that a blind interlocutor cannot access and react to. In many examples, blind people’s eyes are unattractive, and often with deformities, which makes the eye appearance less appealing to the sighted. All of these factors influence the smooth face-to-face communication between the blind and sighted people, which leads to blind people’s poor adaptions in the communication. We implemented a working prototype, namely E-Gaze (glasses), an assistive device based on an eye tracking system. E-Gaze attempts to simulate the natural gaze for blind people, especially establishing the “eye contact” between the blind and sighted people to enhance the engagement in the face-to-face communication. The interactive gaze behaviors of the E-Gaze are based on a model that combines a turn-taking strategy and the eye-contact mechanism. In order to test the impact of the interactive gaze model in the face-to-face communication, we conducted an experiment with sixteen participants. In the user experiment, participants had a monologue with a dummy wearing the E-Gaze. Two monologues took place under two experimental conditions (i.e., Interactive Gaze and Random Gaze) with counter balancing to avoid carry-over effects. Results well support the hypothesis that the interactive gaze model of the E-Gaze can enable the sighted to feel attention from the listener, enhancing the level of engagement in the face-to-face communication. We also obtain insights and design implications from participants’ comments.