Can Real-Time Gaze Sharing Help Team Collaboration? A Preliminary Examination of its Effectiveness with Pairs

Abstract

Complex and dynamic domains rely on operators to collaborate on multiple tasks and cope with changes in task demands. Gaze sharing is a means of communication used to exchange visual information by allowing teammates to view each other’s gaze points on their displays. Existing work on gaze sharing focuses on relatively simple task-specific domains and no work-to-date addresses how to use gaze sharing in data-rich environments. For this study, nine pairs of participants completed a UAV search and rescue command-and-control task with three visualization techniques: no gaze sharing, gaze sharing using the real-time dot, and gaze sharing using the real-time fixation trail. Our preliminary results show that performance scores using the real-time fixation trail were statistically significantly higher than when no gaze sharing was present. This suggests that the real-time fixation trail is a promising tool to better understand operators’ strategies and could form the basis of an adaptive display.