Seminar on science, innovation and technology

Abstract

In our everyday communication, besides speech, non-verbal cues such as gaze and hand gestures (looking directions) play a crucial role in allowing us to communicate and work together efficiently. However, current remote collaboration solutions, such as video conferencing interfaces, do not support these cues effectively. This is due to certain hardware limitations of commodity personal computers, such as laptop or tablet, reducing users’ communication and performance in several contexts.

In this talk, we will first go through different research endeavors to improve gaze awareness in remote communication. Similarly, we will also survey research works in capturing and representing users’ hand gestures in remote collaboration. These include approaches ranging from heavily instrumented hardware to effectively leveraging the devices’ form-factor. We will also explore the effects of different hand gestures representations on remote collaboration. At t2i lab, we contribute to these bodies of research two interfaces called MirrorTablet and GazeLens, which require minimal hardware instrumentations to respectively improve perception of gaze and hand gestures in remote collaboration.

We will round off the talk by discussing some remaining issues and potential aspects to further investigate in the future, in order to better integrate non-verbal communications using hand gestures and gaze in remote collaboration.

Bio

Khanh-Duy Le, called Duy in short form, is currently a doctoral candidate at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg Sweden, with a specialization in human computer interaction. He holds a master’s degree in Multimedia from Télécom ParisTech, France and a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from the University of Science, VNU-HCM, Vietnam. His doctoral research topic focuses on designing interfaces to better support workspace awareness, especially through leveraging non-verbal communication, in remote collaboration using interactive surfaces. He will defend his doctoral thesis in November of 2019. Before joining Chalmers, he worked as a research intern in the human-machine interface group of Technicolor Research and Innovation (now acquired by InterDigital) in France. This was as part of his master study, where he contributed to designing novel interfaces to enrich users’ experience in creating, authoring and viewing audiovisual contents using mobile devices.