Abstract
Gaze behaviors contain rich information regarding a person's emotions and engagements. Reciprocal eye contact can invoke feelings of liking between two strangers. But blind people cannot perceive and establish the eye contact with sighted counterparts, causing their feelings of social isolation and low confidence in conversations. Thus, our research purpose is to let blind people perceive and react gaze behaviors in social interactions. A Social Glasses system has been implemented iteratively to deliver the multisensory feedback channels of the “eye contact”, integrating both visual and tactile feedback. Specifically, the system consists of a Social Glasses device and a tactile wristband, which are worn by a blind person. The Social Glasses simulates the natural gaze for the blind person, aiming at establishing the “eye contact” between blind and sighted people. The tactile wristband enables the blind person to perceive the corresponding tactile feedback when an “eye contact” happens. To test the system, we conducted a user experiment with 40 participants, including 10 blind-sighted pairs (N = 20) and 10 blindfolded-sighted pairs (N = 20), to see how it could help increase the communication quality between blind and sighted people, as well as to suggest implications for its design. Our main findings demonstrated that both the simulated gaze and the tactile feedback were significantly effective to enhance the communication quality in blind-sighted conversations. Overall, we contribute (1) empirical research findings on how a Social Glasses system enhances the communication quality in blind-sighted conversations; and (2) design principles to inform future assistive wearable device for augmenting social interactions.
Highlights
Blind people have benefited from other modalities already, such as hearing and touch
A significant interaction effect was observed between the Interactive Gaze and the participant roles
It revealed that the sighted participants perceived significantly higher co-presence, attention allocation, Perceived Message Understanding (PMU), Perceived Affective Understanding (PAU), Perceived Emotional Interdependence (PEI) and Perceived Behavioral Interdependence (PBI) when the Interactive Gaze was active than it was not (Fig. 8)
Summary
Blind people have benefited from other modalities already, such as hearing and touch. An example is regarding sensory compensation of blind people. Due to a loss of vision, some blind people are very sensitive for their hearing and touch modalities. Accessing to nonverbal cues (e.g., gaze and eye contact) in social interactions is still vital to blind people. An old English proverb says: ‘‘The eyes are the window to the soul’’. Some observers could gain a wealth of information such as a person’s emotions, mental states [1] and attention [2], [3]. Gaze behaviors (e.g., eye contact) are visual cues, which blind people cannot perceive
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