Remote collaborations are becoming ubiquitous, but, despite their many advantages, face unique challenges compared to collocated collaborations. Visualizing the collaborator's point of gaze on a shared screen has been explored as a promising way to alleviate some of these limitations by increasing shared awareness. However, prior studies on shared gaze have not considered the medium of communication and have only studied its effect on audio. This paper presents a study that compares the effects of shared gaze on collaboration performance during audio- and text-based communication. We find that for text, shared gaze improved task correctness and led collaborators to look at and talk more about shared content. Similar trends are found for gaze-augmented voice communication, but contrary to the slower performance in text, it also saw improvements in completion time as well as in cognitive workload. Our findings demonstrate the differences in how shared gaze impacts audio- versus text-based communication and highlight the need to further understand the nuances of the medium of communication when designing novel tools to support remote collaborators.

Online collaborative writing is an increasingly common practice. Despite its positive effect on productivity and quality of work, it poses challenges to co-authors in remote settings because of limitations in conversational grounding and activity awareness. This paper presents Eye-Write, a novel system which allows two co-authors to see at will the location of their partner's gaze within a text editor. To investigate the effect of shared gaze on collaboration, we conducted a study on synchronous remote collaborative writing in academic settings with 20 dyads. Gaze sharing improved five aspects of perceived collaboration quality: mutual understanding, level of joint attention, flow of communication, level of negotiation, and awareness of the co-author's activity. Furthermore, dyads whose participants deactivated the gaze visualization showed a smaller degree of collaboration. Our findings offer insights for future text editors by outlining the benefits of at-will gaze sharing in collaborative writing.