Virtual gaze: exploring use of gaze as rich interaction method with virtual agent in interactive virtual reality content

Abstract

Nonverbal cues, especially eye gaze, plays an important role in our daily communication, not just as an indicator of interest, but also as a method to convey information to another party. In this work, we propose a simulation of human eye gaze in Virtual Reality content to improve immersion of interaction between user and virtual agent. We developed an eye-tracking integrated interactive narrative content with a focus on player's interaction with gaze aware virtual agent, which is capable of reacting towards the player's gaze to simulate real human-to-human communication in VR environment and conducted an initial study to measure user's reaction.