Simple multi-party video conversation system focused on participant eye gaze: "Ptolemaeus" provides participants with smooth turn-taking

This paper shows a prototype system that provides a natural multi-party conversation environment among participants in different places. Eye gaze is an important feature for maintaining smooth multi-party conversations because it indicates whom the speech is addressing or nominates the next speaker. Nevertheless, most popular video conversation systems, such as Skype or FaceTime, do not support the interaction of eye gaze. Serious confusion is caused in multi-party video conversation systems that have no eye gaze support. For example, who is the addressee of the speech? Who is the next speaker? We propose a simple multi-party video conversation environment called Ptolemaeus that realizes eye gaze interaction among more than three participants without any special equipment. This system provides natural turn-taking in face-to-face video conversations and can be implemented more easily than former schemes concerned with eye gaze interaction.