An Approach of Query Audience’s Attention in Virtual Speech

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 24; no. 16; p. 5363
• Main Authors: Kang, Hongbo, Yang, Rui, Song, Ruoyang, Yang, Chunjie, Wang, Wenqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 20.08.2024; MDPI
• Subjects: attention evaluation; Audiences; Communication; Consumer behavior; Consumers; Cultural heritage; Distance learning; EEG; Eye contact; Eye movements; gaze tracking; Machine learning; Neural networks; Online instruction; Speech; Students; Usability; Virtual reality; virtual speech
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s24165363

Virtual speeches are a very popular way for remote multi-user communication, but it has the disadvantage of the lack of eye contact. This paper proposes the evaluation of an online audience attention based on gaze tracking. Our research only uses webcams to capture the audience’s head posture, gaze time, and other features, providing a low-cost method for attention monitoring with reference values across multiple domains. Meantime, we also propose a set of indexes which can be used to evaluate the audience’s degree of attention, making up for the fact that the speaker cannot gauge the audience’s concentration through eye contact during online speeches. We selected 96 students for a 20 min group simulation session and used Spearman’s correlation coefficient to analyze the correlation between our evaluation indicators and concentration. The result showed that each evaluation index has a significant correlation with the degree of attention (p = 0.01), and all the students in the focused group met the thresholds set by each of our evaluation indicators, while the students in the non-focused group failed to reach the standard. During the simulation, eye movement data and EEG signals were measured synchronously for the second group of students. The EEG results of the students were consistent with the systematic evaluation. The performance of the measured EEG signals confirmed the accuracy of the systematic evaluation.