Effects of Shared Gaze on Audio-Versus Text-Based Remote Collaborations

Abstract

Remote collaborations are becoming ubiquitous, but, despite their many advantages, face unique challenges compared to collocated collaborations. Visualizing the collaborator's point of gaze on a shared screen has been explored as a promising way to alleviate some of these limitations by increasing shared awareness. However, prior studies on shared gaze have not considered the medium of communication and have only studied its effect on audio. This paper presents a study that compares the effects of shared gaze on collaboration performance during audio-and text-based communication. We find that for text, shared gaze improved task correctness and led collaborators to look at and talk more about shared content. Similar trends are found for gaze-augmented voice communication, but contrary to the slower performance in text, it also saw improvements in completion time as well as in cognitive workload. Our findings demonstrate the differences in how shared gaze impacts audio-versus text-based communication and highlight the need to further understand the nuances of the medium of communication when designing novel tools to support remote collaborators.