Collaboration is at the heart of human interactions. With the geographically dispersed nature of workplaces and social circles, technologies that allow remote individuals to communicate and collaborate is a basic necessity of our times.
Video-based collaboration is increasingly relevant in our social interactions, and domains such as education, telemedicine, law enforcement, and different industrial and consumer workflows.
“Despite years of technological advancement, remote video-based collaboration is still a challenge in the case of complex, tightly-coupled tasks”, Akkil says.
Inspired by the communicative functions of human eyes in our social interactions and motivated by the increasing availability of gaze trackers (i.e technological devices that can estimate where a person is looking) in the consumer market, Akkil evaluated in his thesis the value of gaze awareness in a number of video-based remote-collaboration situations.
The findings suggest that gaze awareness is useful in remote collaboration for physical tasks. Shared gaze enables efficient communication of spatial information, helps viewers to predict task-relevant intentions, and enables improved situational awareness. However, different contextual factors can influence the utility of shared gaze.
The findings of the thesis can contribute towards designing future remote-collaboration systems.
Deepak Akkil is from India and has long academic experience working in the domain of gaze-tracking. Currently, Deepak is working at Tobii AB, Stockholm, developing the technology of gaze tracking for the mainstream consumer market.
The doctoral dissertation of Msc. Deepak Akkil in the field of Interactive Technology titled Gaze Awareness in Computer- Mediated Collaborative Physical Tasks will be publicly examined in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University at 12.00 Noon, Friday 30 August 2019, in Pinni A building Paavo Koli auditorium. The Opponent will be Associate Prof. Roman Bednarik, School of Computing, University of Eastern Finland. The Custos will be Docent Poika Isokoski, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University.
The dissertation is available online at the http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-1178-0
Live Streaming of the event will be available here