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Preserving Communication Context 225

partner’s face and body. The facial expressions and gestures provide
a variety of non-verbal cues that are essential in human communi-
cation. The focus of a design session changes dramatically. When we
discuss abstract concepts or design philosophy, we often see each
other’s face. When we discuss concrete system architectures, we in-
tensively use a whiteboard by drawing diagrams on it (Ishii and
Arita 1991, 165).
The effort to simulate as closely as possible the collaboration in
front of a whiteboard was taken a step further in ClearBoard, the
first prototype to refer explicitly to eye contact and gaze awareness
(see Figure 1). The design metaphor here was talking through and
drawing on a transparent glass window. The system used colored
markers on a glass board, and video and a half-mirror technique to
capture and orient the drawings. In this case, users recognized their
partner as being behind a glass board and they did not hesitate to
draw over the facial image. The large size of the drawing board sup-
ported awareness of gesture and of the partner’s surrounding envi-
ronment, as well as of his visual focus.
The most novel feature of ClearBoard, and the most important,
is that it provides precise “gaze awareness” or “gaze tracking.” A
ClearBoard user can easily recognize what the partner is gazing at
on the screen during a conversation. The importance of eye contact
is often discussed in the design of face-to-face communication tools.
However, we believe the concept of gaze awareness is more general-
ized and is a more important notion. Gaze awareness lets a user
know what the partner is looking at, the user’s face or anything else
on the shared workspace. If the partner is looking at you, you know
it. If the partner is gazing at an object in the shared workspace, you
can know what the object is. Eye contact can be seen as just a special
case of gaze awareness (Ishii and Kobayashi 1992, 530–531).
Gaze awareness allows participants to better situate the in-
teraction within its context, providing a wider variety of cues for
feedback and a richer awareness of the environment and others’ ac-
tivities. The emphasis on non-verbal cues and direction of gaze
rather than eye contact is particularly significant coming from a cul-
ture in which eye contact is much less common than in Western cul-
ture and is in many cases considered rude. Indeed, Ishii et al. make
a veiled reference to this problem: “ClearBoard makes eye contact
easy to establish and may even make it more difficult to avoid. It has
been shown that the use of eye contact varies with the culture (e.g.
Argyle 1975); these are issues for further exploration in ClearBoard
settings” (Ishii, Kobayashi and Grudin 1993, 372).