Look together: using gaze for assisting co-located collaborative search

Abstract

Gaze information provides indication of users focus which complements remote collaboration tasks, as distant users can see their partner's focus. In this paper, we apply gaze for co-located collaboration, where users' gaze locations are presented on the same display, to help collaboration between partners. We integrated various types of gaze indicators on the user interface of a collaborative search system, and we conducted two user studies to understand how gaze enhances coordination and communication between co-located users. Our results show that gaze indeed enhances co-located collaboration, but with a trade-off between visibility of gaze indicators and user distraction. Users acknowledged that seeing gaze indicators eases communication, because it let them be aware of their partner's interests and attention. However, users can be reluctant to share their gaze information due to trust and privacy, as gaze potentially divulges their interests.

Evaluation of Appearance-Based Methods and Implications for Gaze-Based Applications

“…However, the allowed gaze estimation error depends on the sizes of the gaze targets. These gaze targets could be fine-level details on the screen [11], closely connected [77] or separate content on the screen [10], large physical objects [2], or rough gaze direction [45,69]. Gaze-based user modelling and passive eye monitoring require gaze estimation to detect gaze patterns instead of individual points.…”

Which one is me?

“…Systems such as Looking Glass [26], Media Ribbon [2], StrikeAPose [34] and MyPosition [31] support multi-user interaction by mid-air gestures. Gaze-enabled public displays have also started to support multiple users [12,16,38]. Other displays allow interaction via mobile devices [14,18,32].…”

“…In the vast majority of cases people approach public displays in groups [7,11,26], which led to an increasing number of very large displays to allow interaction by multiple users [1,2]. Multi-user interactive public displays often respond to individual users by assigning a visual representation to each user [17,33,38]. The past years witnessed an extensive employment of user representations on the display.…”

Co-Located Team Designing: the oscillation between individual and social processes

“…A prerequisite of reaching a shared team understanding is to attain joint attention in the team to initiate a dialogue (Harvey, 2014). Joint attention may be defined as participant's being mutually oriented to a common part of their visible environment, and are aware that their conversational partners are also looking at it (Whittaker & O'Conaill, 1997;Zhang et al, 2017).…”