Roel Vertegaal Ergonomics Department University of Twente, The Netherlands E-mail: roel@acm.org Home Page: http://reddwarf.wmw.utwente.nl GAZE Groupware System: http://reddwarf.wmw.utwente.nl/gaze.html Keywords: Multimodal Interaction, Cognition and CommunicationAbstract
With the advent of high-bandwidth networking services, video conferencing and groupware systems have the potential of becoming real supplements to our day-to-day multiparty communication and collaboration needs. However, broad adaptation of such technology relies on its effectiveness in meeting our communication demands. We feel the effectiveness of such mediated systems is currently prohibited by their lack of support for conversational awareness features: information about who is talking to whom. This awareness problem is a generic one throughout cooperative work. In this lecture I will discuss an analytical framework which ties together awareness issues into a single problem of conveying joint attention, and review emperical evidence for this claim. The GAZE Groupware System is presented as a candidate solution for capturing and conveying joint attention throughout mediated work. Using deskmounted eyetracking technology, the system conveys where each participant looks in a 3D virtual meeting room, providing gaze awareness during conversations as well as document editing. This way, the system facilitates more natural patterns of turntaking and may ease joint editing tasks: e.g., participants can convey which sentence in a document they would like to edit simply by looking at it.
Roel Vertegaal is a computer scientist specializing in human aspects of technology, human-computer interaction (especially multimodal input/output), and computer supported collaborative work. He is a research assistant with the Ergonomics Department at Twente University, The Netherlands. Vertegaal began his career in music, having done a Bachelor of Music degree at Utrecht School of the Arts where he studied and taught Music Technology and worked at the Center for Knowledge Technology on perceptual querying of musical audio databases. After completing an M.Phil. in Computer Science on the use of input devices in musical audio browsing at the University of Bradford, UK, he is now doing a PhD in Cognitive Ergonomics, focusing on eye input for collaborative systems and the role of gaze direction in human communication.