Development and evaluation of gesture rich collaborative drawing tools.

Abstract

Non-verbal gestures are a rich source of communication, especially in tasks involving spatial concepts. When teams working on a common task are separated geographically, the information in gestures is lost. However, there are many ways to convey gestures over distance to make up for this loss. In a simple shared collaborative software tool, cursors can be used to exchange simple gestures. It is also possible to increase the richness of information exchanged by sharing hand images of the participants to each other. One of the questions this thesis aims to answer is whether hand images are necessary at all or if a simple cursor would be sufficient. This thesis describes the development and evaluation of software for collaborative drawing, in which two users in multiple locations can connect and draw using a simple drawing tool. They will share the same drawing screen but have separate cursors. A table top touch screen was set up for the experiment. The evaluation of the software was based on comparing collaboration for a spatial design/drawing when users collaborate by three different methods: face-to-face, virtual sketching, and virtual sketching with the hand gestures of the virtual collaborators projected on the drawing surface. Two tools were created for this work- one for virtual sketching and the other for virtual sketching that enables sharing of hand gestures. The results indicated that users’ performance in the face-to-face collaboration was almost identical to virtual collaboration with hand images. Virtual collaboration without hand images was significantly more difficult. These results suggest that rich hand gestures conveyed with the hands in face-to-face settings is important in joint spatial tasks; their loss reduces effectiveness in virtual collaboration on such tasks. However, the addition of hand images projected on a joint work surface can restore effectiveness to levels similar to that of face-to-face collaboration. A robust setup of the software enabling transfer of rich hand gestures could be used where in getting all team members to a single geographical location for a meeting might be time consuming, expensively or simply impossible.