Design Suggestions on Remote Pointing in Distant Collaborations

In this paper, we will discuss design suggestions to realize remote pointing in distant collaborations. We use the pointing to anchor what we say to real worlds in our daily life. In the virtual world, we anchor our conversation to virtual worlds. The anchoring is necessary to establish mutual understanding between participants but important elements for the anchoring are not known. We show that the pointing toward a desk space can be done using either eyes or using both the eyes and a hand without significant difference in a pointing accuracy under the face-to-face condition. Also, participants judge pointed locations mainly using a hand cue even if the pointer pointed with her eyes and her hand. Therefore, avatars should be able to show hand information accurately but the relation between the eyes and a hand does not require the accurate representation as the hand information. Stereoscopic images can recreate 73% of information that is provided by a faceto-face pointing and more accurate recreation of the face-to-face pointing requires fine-tunings of the system to each user. We show that it is possible to realize the high pointing accuracy without the system tuning to each user, if we use a simple rod as a remote virtual finger.