I came across this issue a couple of times and I decided to make a blog-post reminder for my personal glossary.
The “Mida’s Touch” problem refers to the fact that the eyes cannot be used directly as a mouse, because the eyes are never “off.” Thus one of the main problems when using the eye-gaze for selection purpose is to somehow combine it with a “clutch” that can engage/disengage eye-gaze control. A good clutch should be quick to operate, not increase the cognitive load unnecessarily and not disturb the user’s gaze-pattern, because the user will often be looking at some object when she wants to engage eye-tracking, and it would thus slow down the communication if she had to move her eyes to do it.
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Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
–Charles Baudelaire
Bly, S. A., and Minneman, S. L. Commune: a shared drawing surface. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOIS and IEEE CS TC-OA conference on Office information systems (New York, NY, USA, 1990), ACM, pp. 184–192. [pdf]
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The starting assumption of this work was that in group design situations, the activity of creating and using the marks on the drawing surface is as important as the marks themselves. During observations of design meetings, the authors identified three kinds of actions: draw, write and gesture. These were combined in different ways to support different uses: providing illustrations, or emphasis on a particular part of the talk, provide visual reminders, making references or other uses.
To support these mechanisms at a distance the authors designed a system called Commune where users could superimpose sketches to a common drawing surface while talking. They conducted a tight observation of use of the system by several pairs and they found that neither the talk nor the marks alone effectively communicate the issue under consideration.
One of the advantage that they saw in the use of Commune was the ability to be in the same place at the same time. While this is possible with the virtual superimosition of the marks that is not actually possible in real situations and the authors speculated that this could have been an advantage.
However, they also identified three problems: the stilii were difficult to use with sketches consisting of short line segments; second the drawing space was small and finally Commune constrained gestures to pointing actions.
Bekker, M. M., Olson, J. S., and Olson, G. M. Analysis of gestures in face-to-face design teams provides guidance for how to use groupware in design. In DIS ’95: Proceedings of the 1st conference on Designing interactive systems (Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, 1995), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, pp. 157–166. [pdf]
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This paper presents some findings from ethnographic observations of collaborators using gestures in face-to-face meetings. This work summarize previous research on the field like the work of Tang that found that 35% of hand movements in a group meeting are gestures. They developed a coding scheme for gestures and they defined the following top-level categories: Kinetic (the movements reproduces an action performance), Spatial (the movement indicates distance or location or size), Point (fingers point to some person, to some object or place), and Other.
The authors found that pointing was an highly frequent gesture that was used in the majority of situation in their task. The paper also reports important critics to telepointers and to the ClearBoard system such as the fact that they are weak gesturing devices as they do not have the rich dynamics of human hands, arms, or body.
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