MirrorTablet: Exploring a low-cost mobile system for capturing unmediated hand gestures in remote collaboration

Paper i proceeding, 2017

Direct and natural images of hand gestures have been shown to benefit remote collaboration on physical tasks in several settings, including ad-hoc ones. However, to capture such unmediated hand gestures within collaborative tasks, existing approaches require stationary hardware systems or heavily instrumented mobile devices, making them unfeasible for use at ad-hoc workplaces. We present MirrorTablet, a low-cost mirror-based system taking advantage of the built-in front-facing camera of a tablet to capture the user’s unmediated hand interactions on and above the screen. This system requires minimal instrumentation of the tablet and can be easily (un-)mounted, making it suitable for mobile usage. A user study with ten pairs of participants on a helper-worker setup working on construction tasks showed that MirrorTablet improved task completion time and had positive effects on participants’ perceived workload when working with unfamiliar tasks compared to using a common sketch-only interface. In addition, qualitative feedback yielded design considerations on hand visualization for mobile device remote collaboration on physical tasks.