Development and Evaluation of Multimodal Aggregate Pointer for Large-scale Collaborative Learning

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We developed and studied two new telepointers, an aggregate pointer and a delegate pointer, to support remote collaboration and group awareness in distributed learning environments so many people can more easily communicate with each other. We conducted experiments that showed people are not good at accurately locating the focus of multiple telepointers. The aggregate pointer makes it easier for people to understand the overall direction of others' intentions or interests, help people share more accurate aggregated information, and complement individual telepointers. The aggregate pointer is effective at giving feedback of the aggregated information of many telepointers, but it is difficult to use the aggregate pointer to affect specific objects, for example pushing a button.To solve this problem, we developed the delegate pointer. It enables people to delegate the rights of their own pointers to the pointer of someone they trust. The delegate pointer promotes group collaboration through a fair voting system in interactive environments populated by many people. We showed that there are different methods to control pointer delegation and determined the features of these methods. We also developed a multimodal toolkit library for remote collaboration and group awareness. The toolkit supports multicast communications, multiple telepointers, video processing, and tactile feedback of pointers and videos. Using the toolkit, we developed remote collaboration tools for 2D and 3D video communications that support group awareness. The use of 3D pointers and annotations on autostereoscopic displays was evaluated using a prototype personal 3D videoconferencing tool that we had developed. The evaluation showed that 3D pointing and annotating operations of the tool are easy to understand and easy to use.