The importance of informal communication on the Internet has been increasing in recent years. Several systems for informal communication have been developed. These systems, however, require a particular server and/or specialized 3D contents. In this paper, we propose a system, named InCom, for informal communication in a 3D virtual environment. Browsers which are component of InCom generate 3D virtual worlds from existing common 2D HTML documents. Browsers communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Using avatars makes gaze awareness smooth. Our results show that users shared interests by gaze awareness.

This paper addresses issues regarding to the development of teleconferencing support collaboration focusing on the realistic sensation domain. It argues that the gaze communications are the important mechanisms to enable visual channel and social presence in human-human communications. We propose a new aspect to establish multiple eye contacts and community awareness in multiparty videoconference (VC). The participants can aware of being recognized from any remote sites while they are talking with each other. Community awareness means the ability to aware of group communication in the videoconference. The participant can recognize of who is talking with whom and any communicative groups in a conference. An intelligent image arrangement through a unique position of camera is built and simulated. The systematic placement of images serves the gaze communications by utilizing the characteristic of gaze direction and image's position. The experimental results show that the proposed approach has the significant improvement in the interpersonal communication compared with the conventional VC system.

The networked reality is defined to be the virtual reality used in networks and using networks. The paper describes several levels of the networked reality and their applications.

The goal of visual telecommunication has been to create a sense of "being there" or "telepresence." This paper introduces a novel shared drawing medium called ClearBoard that goes beyond "being there" by providing virtual shared workspace. It realizes (1) a seamless integration of shared drawing space and partner's image, and (2) eye contact to support real-time and remote collaboration by two users. We devised the key metaphor: "talking through and drawing on a transparent glass window" to design ClearBoard. A prototype, ClearBoard-1 is implemented based on the "Drafter-Mirror" architecture. This paper first reviews previous work on shared drawing support to clarify our design goals. We then examine three metaphors that fulfill these goals. The design requirements and the two possible system architectures of ClearBoard are described. Finally, some findings gained through the experimental use of the prototype, including the feature of "gaze awareness," are discussed.