Supporting Hand Gestures in Mobile Remote Collaboration: A Usability Evaluation

Rapid advances in networking and hardware have made it possible for remotely located individuals to perform physical tasks together. Although a range of systems have been developed for remote collaboration, how to support the richness of hand gestures for an expert guiding a mobile worker located in a non-traditional-desktop environment has not been fully explored. HandsOnVideo is a system developed to fill this gap. The system uses a near-eye display to support mobility and unmediated representations of hands to support remote gestures. A usability evaluation has been conducted to gain in-depth understanding of the usefulness and usability of HandsOnVideo and the study yields positive results. In this paper, we describe the evaluation method, report the experimental results, discuss the findings and envision possible future improvements.