Abstract
Existing live tele-teaching systems enable eye-contact between interacting participants, however, they are often incomplete as they neglect finer levels of adherence to gaze such as gaze awareness and gaze following. A multilocation eLearning classroom setting often does not preserve relative neighborhood i.e., displays showing videos of remote participants at each location might not be congruent with their actual seating positions. This leads to incoherent gaze patterns during interactions. We present a media-rich distributed classroom architecture with multiple cameras and displays in each classroom. During interaction changes, cameras capturing appropriate perspectives of participants are streamed to displays in other classrooms. Hence for all interactions, the physical participants of a classroom are presented with appropriate perspectives of remote participants resembling gaze patterns during conventional-classroom interactions. We also present a framework to systematically analyze gaze patterns with its dependencies. The framework dictates optimal placement of media devices ensuring minimal deviation in capturing appropriate perspectives for a given set of resources. Evaluation results on a three classroom test-bed indicates a marked reduction in viewer cognitive load in discerning the entity-at-focus in an eLearning classroom environment.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Camera-display mapping table with gaze quantization errors
Table 3 summarizes the camera to display mapping matrix with Gaze Quantization Errors.
Appendix B: Pre-questionnaire
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a)
Have you taken live online lectures via any eLearning/video-conferencing tool? □ Yes □ No
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b)
If so, how was the online lecture comparable to the in-classroom lecture? □ Horrible □ Bad □ was manageable but not as good □ was good but I still prefer in-classroom lecture □ was as good as in-classroom lecture
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c)
How many courses do you have as online lectures? □ Zero □ One □ Two □ Three □ Four □ more than four
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d)
Do you have any online courses that are highly interactive? □ Yes □ No
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e)
Are you a highly interactive person in class? □ Yes □ No □ Somewhat interactive
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f)
How has your interaction with the distant teacher been? □ Very interactive □ Moderately interactive □ Not interactive
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g)
Have you had lecture sessions as a student where you had to interact with a distant student? □ Yes □ No
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h)
Have you had lecture sessions where the teacher had a set of local students and you were a remote student? □ Yes □ No
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i)
Have you had a lecture where you were a local student and there was a group of distant students participating from elsewhere? □ Yes □ No
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j)
Did it bother you when a distant participant (student/teacher) was not looking at you when you were interacting with him/her? □ Yes □ No
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Narayanan, R., Rangan, V.P., Gopalakrishnan, U. et al. Multiparty gaze preservation through perspective switching for interactive elearning environments. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 17461–17494 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-7078-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-7078-y