Ou, J., Fussell, S. R., Chen, X., Setlock, L. D., and Yang, J. Gestural communication over video stream: supporting multimodal interaction for remote collaborative physical tasks. In ICMI ’03: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Multimodal interfaces (New York, NY, USA, 2003), ACM Press, pp. 242–249. [pdf]

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This paper presents the DOVE  system to support multimodal communication during collaborative physical tasks. In particular, the system allows the user to communicate at distance remote gestures, both simple pointing or more complex ones.

The author tested three different conditions: video only, DOVE with manual erase and DOVE with automatic erase finding better performance for this last condition. Their finding suggests that collaborators perform best when the gestures disappear automatically, much like ordinary hand gestures disappear once people have completed them (similarly to ConcertChat).

They also observed complex drawings involving several pen strokes. In this case automatic recognition or automatic erase does not help. The article contains also a good review of the literature.