LiveMask: A Telepresence Surrogate System with a Face-Shaped Screen for Supporting Nonverbal Communication

We propose a telepresence system with a real human face-shaped screen. This system tracks the remote user's face and extracts the head motion and the face image. The face-shaped screen moves along three degree-of-freedom (DOF) by reflecting the user's head gestures. As the face-shaped screen is molded based on the 3D-shape scan data of the user, the projected image is accurate even when it is seen from different angles. We expect this system can accurately convey the user's nonverbal communication, in particular the user's gaze direction in 3D space that is not correctly transmitted by using a 2D screen (which is known as "the Mona Lisa effect"). To evaluate how this system can contribute to the communication, we conducted three experiments. The first one examines the blind angle of a face-shaped screen and a flat screen, and compares the ease with which users can distinguish facial expressions. The second one evaluates how the direction in which the remote user's face points can be correctly transmitted. The third experiment evaluates how the gaze direction can be correctly transmitted. We found that the recognizable angles of the face-shaped screen were larger, and that the recognition of the head directions was better than on a flat 2D screen. More importantly, we found that the face-shaped screen accurately conveyed the gaze direction, resolving the problem of the Mona Lisa effect.