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ABSTRACT
Eye contact is crucial in social interactions, linking with sincerity and friendliness. However, blind people cannot see and make eye contact when they communicate with sighted people. It influences the involvement of blind people in blind-sighted conversations. Based on this context, we implemented Social glasses with an eye-tracking system, aiming to improve the communication quality between blind and sighted people in face-to-face conversations. Social glasses attempts to simulate the appropriate gaze for blind people, especially establishing the “eye contact” in blind-sighted conversations. To evaluate the impact of the interactive gaze displayed on the Social glasses, we performed dyadic-conversation tests under four experimental conditions (No Gaze, Constant Gaze, Random Gaze, and Interactive Gaze) for 40 participants. Quantitative results showed that the Interactive gaze has a positive impact on improving the communication quality between blind and sighted people, which were consistent with a qualitative analysis of the participants’ comments.
Acknowledgments
We thank Siti Aisyah binti Anas for the effort and expertise in developing the Social glasses system. We also thank Xiang Cheng, Liang Zang, and Zhi Liu to help us organize the participants from Yangzhou Special Education School and Jiangsu College of Tourism to participate in this research project. This research is strongly supported by the China Scholarship Council and facilitated by the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The initial prototype was partially helped by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers [JP16K12484] and [JP26118006].
Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work, there is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or the review of, the manuscript entitled, “Social Glasses: Simulating Interactive Gaze for Visually Impaired People in Face-to-Face Communication”.
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