Gestural communication is an important part of shared work, both in face-to-face settings and distributed environments. However, gestures in groupware are often difficult to see and interpret because of disruptions to their motion caused by network jitter. One way to improve the visibility of remote gestures is by using traces-visualizations of the last few moments' of a remote pointer's motion. We carried out an experiment to test the effectiveness of traces in helping people interpret gestures. We found that telepointer traces dramatically improved people's accuracy and confidence in their decisions as jitter delays grew larger. Our results suggest that telepointer traces and other visualizations of interaction history can be used to enrich communication among remote collaborators.
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