Attention from Afar: Simulating the gazes of remote participants in hybrid meetings

Gaze is a powerful form of social feedback, providing cues about attention and interest, and boredom and distraction. We designed a working prototype that enabled remote participants in a collocated meeting to look around the local meeting space, and that showed local participants where the remote participants' "simulated gazes" (that is, their virtual cameras) were directed. Of course, pointing a camera is not the same as gazing, and so we conducted a study to understand how simulated gazes might be used, and to what extent they would be experienced as social cues. Findings range from the use of simulated gaze to signal attention, to ways in which local and remote participants experienced these simulated gazes. These findings illustrate the value of indirection and abstraction in presenting social cues; raise issues of privacy, visibility, and participation asymmetry; and suggest implications for design and further research.