“Where are you pointing at? ” a study of remote collaboration in a werable videoconference system

Bauer, M., Kortuem, G., and Segall, Z. (1999). “Where are you pointing at? ” a study of remote collaboration in a werable videoconference system. In Proceedings of the3rd International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’99), pages 151–158, San Francisco, CA, USA. IEEE. [pdf]

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The results show that by using a reality-augmenting telepointer a remote user can effectively guide and direct a wearable user’s activities. The analysis of verbal communication behavior and pointing gestures clearly indicates that experts overwhelmingly used pointing for guiding workers through physical tasks. While the use of pointing reached 99%, verbal instructions were used considerably less. In more than 20% of all the cases experts did not use verbal instructions at all, but relied on pointing alone instead.

The majority of verbal instructions contained deictic references like ‘here’, ‘over there’, ‘this’, and ‘that’. Because deictic references are mostly used in connection with and in support of gestures, this finding is a strong indication that participants naturally combined pointing gestures with verbal communication, much the same they

do in face-to-face conversations.

Bauer Telepointer

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