Gaze patterns during remote presentations while listening and speaking

Managing an audience's visual attention to presentation content is critical for effective communication in tele-conferences. This paper explores how audience and presenter coordinate visual and verbal information, and how consistent their gaze behavior is, to understand if their gaze behavior can be used for inferring and communicating attention in remote presentations. In a lab study, participants were asked first to view a short video presentation, and next, to rehearse and present to a remote viewer using the slides from the video presentation. We found that presenters coordinate their speech and gaze at visual regions of the slides in a timely manner (in 72% of all events analyzed), whereas audience only looked at what the presenter talked about in 53% of all events. Rehearsing aloud and presenting resulted in similar scanpaths. To further explore if it possible to infer if what a presenter is looking at is also talked about, we successfully trained models to detect an attention match between gaze and speech. These findings suggest that using the presenter's gaze has the potential to reliably communicate the presenter's focus on essential parts of the visual presentation material to help the audience better follow the presenter.