# AnyPlace: Automatic Gaze Alignment of the Teleported Avatar for MR Collaborative Environments
## 5 Experiments and Results
### Experiments 2: Qualitative Co-Presence Comparison  
To evaluate the level of participant-felt co-presence with the teleported avatar related to gaze accuracy, we investigated how participants respond to two conditions (gaze alignment on or off the avatar) and two different scenarios (idle or communication with the avatar), as indicated in Table 1. In the experiment, the participants were informed of the purpose of our study and given instructions on how to perform the experiment. We presented a scenario to the participants, similar to that in previous studies related to interaction experiments with virtual avatars. Specifically, we adopted a greeting scenario in a university as proposed by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [30]. In the communication scenario of our experiment, most of the participants were undergraduate students, and the participants played the role of the students while the virtual avatar played the role of a teacher. To measure effective co-presence, the teleported avatar was operated by a pre-determined control method in the local environment. Twenty-six paid participants with an average age of 25 years participated in the within-subject experiment, and our experiment was constructed to present in a random order among four cases. If the participant did not say or do anything in the communication scenario, the virtual avatar was allowed to speak and act according to the control by an operator behind the curtain as Wizard-of-Oz testing [31].  
After carrying out the task, the participant's co-presence was measured by a co-presence questionnaire with a seven-point Likert scale [32]. We defined co-presence as the participant perceiving someone to be in the same space [33]. Figure 8 shows the results of our quantitative experiment of participants' experiences in terms of gaze accuracy of the avatar. We evaluated co-presence scores generated by the different situations through a pairwise comparison by two-sample \(t\)-tests (i.e., gaze alignment in the idle situation or when gaze does not fit, gaze alignment in the communication situation or when gaze does not fit). The two-sample \(t\)-tests in the idle situation revealed meaningful main effects at  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Test Conditions** & **Gaze Matching** & **Scenario** \\ \hline GazeOn\_Idle & Consistency & No conversation \\ \hline GazeOff\_Idle & Inconsistency & No conversation \\ \hline GazeOn\_Communication & Consistency & Have a conversation \\ \hline GazeOff\_Communication & Inconsistency & Have a conversation \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: The four conditions for experiments: the configured factors consisted of gaze alignment (gaze alignment on or off) and interaction scenario types (idle vs. communication).  
Figure 7: The results of gaze alignment error using the Kinect V2. The horizontal axis is the difference of various angles used in the experiment, while the vertical axis indicates the angle error of gaze alignment.  
\(p<0.05\) regarding the level of co-presence. A pairwise comparison showed a significant effect in the statistical analysis (t(44) = 5, \(p<0.05\)). Secondly, we found a significant main effect at \(p<0.05\) regarding the level of co-presence with two-sample \(t\)-tests in the communication situation. A pairwise comparison was shown to reveal a main effect in the statistical analysis (t(44) = 8.04, \(p<0.05\)). In the case of communication, our experimental study showed that participants felt a greater co-presence than in the idle situation.