Shared Gaze in Collaborative Visual Search

ABSTRACTCollaboration improves efficiency, avoids duplication of efforts, improves goal-awareness, and makes working generally more pleasurable. While collaboration is desirable, it introduces additional costs because of the required coordination. In this article, we study how visual search is affected by gaze-sharing collaboration. There is evidence that pairs of visual searchers using gaze-only sharing are more efficient than single searchers. We extend this result by investigating if groups of three searchers are more efficient, and if and how the groups of searchers develop their search strategy. We conducted an experiment to understand how the collaboration develops when groups of one to three participants perform a visual search task by collaborating with shared gaze. The task was to state if the target was present among distractors. Our results show that users are able to develop an efficient search and division-of-labor strategy when the only collaboration method is gaze-sharing.