Many people experience difficulties in capturing the natural facial expressions of their subjects for several reasons: many subjects become stressed when facing a camera, while other "camera-wise" subjects -- those accustomed to being photographed -- often make stage faces. Moreover, it is often quite difficult to take pictures of children, since they often look away from the camera.
This paper proposes a novel interactive technique, the EyeCatcher, to help photographers capture a variety of natural looking facial expressions by keeping the eyes of subjects focused on the camera without the stress of photography (Fig. 1).

The main concepts of the EyeCatcher are as follows:

1. Keeping the eyes of the subjects focused on the camera
2. Reducing the stress associated with being photographed
3. Extending existing digital cameras

For these reasons, we attach a small display to the front of the camera. By presenting images or videos (e.g., friends, pets, or animation characters) on the display, we can (1) keep the eyes of the subjects focused toward the camera, and (2) turn their attention to content shown in the display and away from the stress of being photographed (Fig. 2).

In addition, we designed the system so that the small display can be attached to existing digital cameras using a "hot shoe connector". The hot shoe connector is an extension connecter mainly used for strobes by experienced photographers on many digital cameras; both single lens reflex cameras and high-end compact cameras (Fig. 3). The function of the hot shoe connector is to connect the camera with an external device both "physically" and "electrically". Using a hot shoe connector to attach our novel device, we can not only stably t the device on the camera, but also detect input signals from the camera (e.g., shutter button status) and use them to control the device.

In this section, we explain the implementation of the EyeCatcher prototype. First, we selected a high-end compact digital camera (Ricoh GR Digital2) for attachment of the EyeCatcher. The GR Digital2 is famous for its picture quality, and is used extensively as the camera of choice by professional and semiprofessional photographers.Fig. 4 shows an image of the prototype.
The prototype system consists of three main components: (1) a presentation component on the front, (2) a selection component on the back, and (3) a control component located between the two (Fig. 5).

In this section, we explain the content shown in the EyeCatcher. We define the conditions for selecting content as follows:

1. Content for attracting the attention of subjects
2. Content familiar with subjects
3. Content for producing various expressions or poses

Figure 6 shows examples of the content which meet the above conditions.

We evaluated the eeffectiveness of the EyeCatcher prototype with regard to two aspects: (1) "How the subjects feel about the EyeCatcher?" and (2) "How people feel about the pictures captured using the EyeCatcher?". First, we took pictures of subjects while showing content using the EyeCatcher, and then obtained subjective feedback from the subjects via a questionnaire. Next, we conducted another questionnaire survey to examine impressions of the captured pictures.

Please read our paper for more detail.

• Koji Tsukada and Maho Oki, EyeCatcher: a digital camera for capturing a variety of natural looking facial expressions in daily snapshots,Proceedings of Pervasive2010, Springer LNCS 6030, pp. 112-129 (May, 2010) [PDF]
• Japanese patent pending.