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We describe experiments designed to measure gaze direction perception capability of humans under face-to-face and display mediated conditions. Gaze perception capability was determined by means of the absolute values of the pitch differences between a looker's actual regards and participants' judgments. We compared the capability under face-to-face, stereoscopic image, and monoscopic image conditions. On average, participants perceived the looker's gaze direction most accurately under the face-to-face condition. As expected, the accuracy under the stereoscopic image condition was higher than the results obtained under the monoscopic image condition. However, individual data did not follow the expected order and our exploratory experiments showed that participants with narrower interpupillary distance than the distance between two stereo cameras had difficulty in judging gaze directions. We also found that the perception of the pitch component of gaze direction is affected by gaze transmission methods but the yaw component is robust and is not affected by the transmission conditions. IntroductionIf a communication system can transmit and receive all the information exchanged between people, the system can recreate natural face-to-face communication. So far, no system can transmit all the information exchanged between people accurately. Since each system has strengths and weaknesses, designers and users should be able to weigh these with respect to cost and the reliability of information that the system can convey. If the quality of the exchanged information can be measured quantitatively, consumers can compare communication systems objectively and researchers can evaluate their newly developed communication systems quantitatively to find out necessary improvements. In this paper, we compare gaze transmission capability of display systems by measuring accuracy of human perception of gaze directions under stereoscopic display mediated, monoscopic display mediated, and face-to-face conditions. The measurement results can be used to quantify similarity between the technology mediated remote communication and the face-to-face communication because the gaze has been regarded as an important component of face-to-face communication. The results are also useful to select appropriate displays to design new communication systems because people can select Imai et al. 123