Don't look at the camera: Achieving perceived eye contact in remote video communication

Eye contact is a crucial aspect of social interaction, conveying social cues based on the direction of one's gaze. Perceiving eye contact affects behavior and social processing. The widespread use of remote video conferencing technologies impacts these social cues, because most technologies do not support natural eye contact. We consider the question of how to best achieve the perception of eye contact when a person is captured by a camera and then rendered on a two-dimensional display. To test this, 17 participants were asked to rate whether 3 actors, photographed while looking at different vertical locations, were making eye contract (yes-no analysis), or were looking up or down (up-down analysis). We quantitatively assessed the gaze direction required to optimize the perception of eye contact with the camera lens. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which suggests looking directly into the camera leads to the perception of eye contact, results from both the yes-no and the up-down analyses showed that it is preferable to look approximately 2° below the camera lens. These results provide a surprising answer to the question of where to look to convey an impression of eye contact in screen-mediated interactions.