Generating an efficient remote collaboration environment using shared gaze.

Abstract

Visual sharing over long distance has become an everyday medium with the current advancements in technology. A person can simply wear a head-mounted display (HMD) such as the Google Glass and enable another person to view what they see on a remote desktop. My thesis tested an interface to see if video conferencing experience could be improved through different cues from a remote user. Hereby, making it simple for the person wearing the head-mount to communicate more efficiently in the video sharing process. The primary focus of this interface is to simplify the human-human interaction over video conferencing. As a part of creating this interface, I reviewed the literature of wearable devices, different forms of communication processes and AR-based advancements. As part of my thesis, I developed a prototype system to test the effects of different cues in a collaborative video-conferencing environment. In the experiment, a remote user instructed a local user by sharing their camera feed using a HMD to perform a set of actions using varied conditions. The experiment used a HMD with an attached camera for the local user and an eye tracker for the remote user. User studies, interviews and tests were performed in different stages to approve the adoption of the prototype. The results showed that the users preferred the mouse + voice and gaze + voice cues over voice only cues in the remote collaborative process over video conferencing. However, there was a trend showing that the participants were in favour of using gaze cues over the other two conditions considering the ease-of-use and clear communication.