# AnyPlace: Automatic Gaze Alignment of the Teleported Avatar for MR Collaborative Environments
## 1 Introduction  
In the days ahead, tele-conference systems will be more and more frequently used as a means of general communication or for business meetings among workers in remote environments [1]. Currently, video-based (or 2D) tele-conference systems are still limited in that they only offer 2D upper body imageries, and inconsistent gaze directions [2, 3]. In recent years, mixed reality (MR) systems have been widely applied in tele-conference, education, entertainment, and healthcare applications provided by the use of technology to merge and interact the real and virtual worlds [4, 5]. In a tele-conference situation, MR systems based on a three-dimensional (3D) teleported avatar moving and interacting naturally in the same location have allowed for a higher co-presence, the sense of being together with other people in the same space, than two-dimensional (2D) streamed videos [6]. In the use of this technology, the teleported avatar of the remote participant presents in the local real environment [7]. Figure 1 shows a 3D MR tele-conference condition for collaboration at the local site with the teleported avatar for the remote participant. In the line thinking, MR-based 3D tele-conference technology can empower remote participants to collaborate through interaction, rather than simple conversation [8]. However, currently there is a lack of study on how to communicate with the teleported avatar in terms of practical deployment. In particular, it is necessary to resolve the environmental differences in order to interact with local participants [1]. For example, imagine a situation where the participant is located at the specific spot in the local site. The teleported avatar of another participant at the remote site should sit or stand in a specific location in the local site. Due to environmental differences, such as furniture configuration and room size, it is difficult to match the gaze between the teleported avatar and the local participant. Figure 2 shows an example of gaze alignment with the teleported avatar in the MR tele-conference system. The participant at site A can communicate and interact with the virtual teleported avatar of the participant at site B. In this case, the participant's eyes should naturally match during the conversation to be adapted to the different configuration of the other site. In order to overcome this problem, our paper proposes a novel method of automatic gaze alignment of the teleported avatar for the MR collaborative system. Our method provides a natural and spatially correct interaction in the local space with the teleported avatar and improves the communication experience for participants by matching gaze direction. Additionally, we measured the spatial accuracy of gaze alignment, and as a qualitative experiment, evaluated and analyzed the results regarding the co-presence felt by the participant with the teleported avatar according to the degree of gaze accuracy. The remainder of our paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a description of related works to our research. Section 3 gives a system overview, and Section 4 gives the detailed implementation of the proposed method in our paper. Section 5 presents the experimental evaluation for the gaze matching accuracy of the teleported avatar and the qualitative effectiveness and reports the main results. Finally, in Section 6, we summarize the paper and conclude with directions for future work. Figure 1: 3D MR tele-conference system to collaborate at a local site with a teleported avatar of the remote participant. The MR tele-conference system can make various typed teleported avatars; for example, a realistic avatar capturing the remote participant (**left**), and a pre-built character-like avatar using a 3D modeling toolkit (**right**). Figure 2: An example of gaze alignment with teleported avatars in the MR tele-conference system: Although the user at site A in the left image is looking in a different direction, the teleported avatar from site B should match the user’s gaze at site A.