Evaluating Techniques to Share Hand Gestures for Remote Collaboration using Top-Down Projection in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

Sharing hand gestures in a remote collaboration offers natural and expressive communication between collaborators. Proposed techniques allow sharing dependent (attached to something) or independent (no attachment) hand gestures in an immersive remote collaboration. However, there are research gaps for sharing hand gestures using different techniques and how it impacts user behaviour and performance. In this paper, we propose an evaluation study to compare sharing dependent and independent hand gestures. We developed a prototype, supporting three techniques of sharing hand gestures: Attached to Local, Attached to Object, and Independent Hands. Also, we use top-down projection, an easy-to-setup method to share a local user's environment with a remote user. We compared the three techniques and found that independent hands help a remote user guide a local user in an object interaction task quicker than hands attached to the local user. It also gives clearer instruction than dependent hands despite limited depth perception caused by top-down projection. A similar trend is also found in remote users' preferences.