Look There! Be Social and Share

Abstract

This paper discusses the social challenges posed by a future wherein humans are using Head-Mounted Devices (HMDs) in their everyday lives. Factors causing a negative attitude towards HMDs today, such as privacy concerns and hardware limitations, are no longer an issue, due to technological advances and increasing distribution and familiarity within society. Thus, the debate of social acceptance of HMDs has moved towards their impact on human-human interaction. We explore the potential of utilizing gaze as an implicit input to HMDs, in order to enhance social engagement among individuals and groups. In particular, we identified three crucial aspects that can benefit from gaze input in order to improve social and shared experiences, namely, automating (sub-)group identification, sharing private information with others and motivating inter-group interaction.