Exploring Gaze And Hand Gestures For Non-Verbal In-Game Communication

Gaze and hand movement are integral parts of interpersonal communication. However, due to the lack of physical presence of another player, these bodily qualities are often underrepresented in remote gameplay. In this paper, we aim at re-enabling these qualities by investigating a combination of gaze and gesture input to support non-verbal communication in a distributed screen-based game setting. Therefore, we implemented a game prototype that couples a shared gaze visualization with an on-screen hand visualization (linked to the gaze position). In an exploratory study, we investigated how players adapt this gaze and gesture combination to support their communication needs. This paper illustrates first insights on how players adopt gaze and gesture for non-verbal communication and indicate that this combined modality can facilitate and enrich remote gameplay.