Videoconferencing
Gets Eyeballed March 30, 2002 By C. Gino Ward
Imagine turning on the news and seeing the anchor look down at his
or her script during the entire broadcast. "You'd tune out pretty
quickly, wouldn't you?" says Steve McNelley, a psychologist and
co-founder of Digital Video Enterprises, a videoconferencing systems
provider. The Irvine, Calif., company, along with a handful of other
startups and Microsoft, is tackling a problem that's hamstrung
videoconferencing's popularity as a one-on-one communication tool:
The inability of conference participants to look each other in the
eye. Eye contact is among the most
important aspects of establishing trust, researchers and
psychologists say. But most desktop videoconferencing systems
position the camera above the monitor, making people appear to each
other to be looking downward.
Microsoft Research is fine-turning a
program that gathers data about the position of a person's head,
eyes, and nose from the video stream of a camera placed under that
person's monitor. The program then transposes the video image onto a
3-D computer-generated head that can be manipulated to appear as if
it's looking into the camera, rather than over it. Microsoft hopes
to incorporate the software into NetMeeting, its online
Web-conferencing product. Microsoft is ironing out the kinks of the
program, which can distort facial images, says Jim Gemmell, a
Microsoft researcher.
Digital Video offers custom-built
videoconferencing systems that use half-silvered mirrors to create
the illusion of eye contact by aligning the camera with the images
from the monitor. The mirror is placed in front of the camera at a
forward-tilting angle, which lets it reflect the images from an
upward-facing monitor positioned just below the camera. It works
much like teleprompters used in television to feed lines to actors
and anchors.
Digital Video is negotiating
production and marketing deals for the system.
Imagine turning on the news and seeing the anchor look down at his
or her script during the entire broadcast. "You'd tune out pretty
quickly, wouldn't you?" says Steve McNelley, a psychologist and
co-founder of Digital Video Enterprises, a videoconferencing systems
provider. The Irvine, Calif., company, along with a handful of other
startups and Microsoft, is tackling a problem that's hamstrung
videoconferencing's popularity as a one-on-one communication tool:
The inability of conference participants to look each other in the
eye. Eye contact is among the most
important aspects of establishing trust, researchers and
psychologists say. But most desktop videoconferencing systems
position the camera above the monitor, making people appear to each
other to be looking downward.