Exploring interface with representation of gesture for remote collaboration

This paper reports on a laboratory study into the gesture representation interface for remote collaboration on physical tasks. Measured by task performance and user's perception of interaction, the experiment assessed two gesture representations (hands vs. cursor pointer) in the context of a video mediated interface which included a view of the remote partner. We did not find any significant difference between the hands condition and the pointer condition when measuring user's task performance. However, our result showed that participants reported an overall preference of using the pointer functionality than using the hands'. We found that participants perceived higher quality of interaction in the hands condition than in the pointer condition and there was a significant difference. Additionally, majority of the participants valued the ability of being able to see each other's face during the collaboration. We conclude with a discussion on the importance of accounting for the user's perception of interaction in addition to the traditional task performance measure in evaluating gesture representation interface, and the importance of considering these two factors in recommending the most suitable interface design with gesture representation for collaboration on physical tasks.