I see what you see: gaze awareness in mobile video collaboration

Abstract

An emerging use of mobile video telephony is to enable joint activities and collaboration on physical tasks. We conducted a controlled user study to understand if seeing the gaze of a remote instructor is beneficial for mobile video collaboration and if it is valuable that the instructor is aware of sharing of the gaze. We compared three gaze sharing configurations, (a) Gaze_Visible where the instructor is aware and can view own gaze point that is being shared, (b) Gaze_Invisible where the instructor is aware of the shared gaze but cannot view her own gaze point and (c) Gaze_Unaware where the instructor is unaware about the gaze sharing, with a baseline of shared-mouse pointer. Our results suggests that naturally occurring gaze may not be as useful as explicitly produced eye movements. Further, instructors prefer using mouse rather than gaze for remote gesturing, while the workers also find value in transferring the gaze information.