Avatar ' s Gaze Control to Facilitate Conversation in Virtual-Space Multi-User Voice Chat System

In order to facilitate multi-party conversations in a shared-virtual-space voice chat environment, we propose a shared-virtual-space voice chat system with an automatic avatar's gaze direction control function using user utterance information, based on an avatar's gaze behavior model of turn-taking in multi-party conversation. In our gaze behavior model, a conversation was divided into three states;during-utterance, right-after-utterance, and silence. The avatar's gaze behaviors were controlled based on a probabilistic state transition model in each state. The developed system attained easy-to-use automatic gaze control without eye-tracking camera or manual operation.