Interacting at a distance

Abstract

It is difficult to interact with computer displays that are across the room. A popular approach is to use laser pointers tracked by a camera, but interaction techniques using laser pointers tend to be imprecise, error-prone, and slow. Although many previous papers discuss laser pointer interaction techniques, none seem to have performed user studies to help inform the design. This paper reports on two studies of laser pointer interactions that answer some of the questions related to interacting with objects using a laser pointer. The first experiment evaluates various parameters of laser pointers. For example, the time to acquire a target is about 1 second, and the jitter due to hand unsteadiness is about ±8 pixels, which can be reduced to about ±2 to ±4 pixels by filtering. We compared 7 different ways to hold various kinds of laser pointers, and found that a laser pointer built into a PalmOS device was the most stable. The second experiment compared 4 different ways to select objects on a large projected display. We found that tapping directly on a wall-size SmartBoard was the fastest and most accurate method, followed by a new interaction technique that copies the area of interest from the big screen to a handheld. Third in speed was the conventional mouse, and the laser pointer came in last, with a time almost twice as long as tapping on the SmartBoard.

Pointing All Around You

“…From the ray-casting options we chose an absolute pointer controlled with a solid object. This technique is simple, pervasive and consistent with a large number of previous implementations and evaluations of 'laser pointers' (e.g., [29,35,37]). We chose not to use hybrid pointing techniques (e.g., [16]) and techniques that require gaze-tracking, in order to focus on the core differences between mouse-based and pointer-based approaches, which will be the most common techniques used for full-coverage environments.…”

“…However, researchers identified early that mouse and touch might not be ideal when trying to control interfaces that have large or multiple displays. One obvious solution is the use of ray-casting techniques in their multiple variants such as laser pointers [7,29,35,37], the detection of fingers or hands for pointing [45,52], or the seamless combination of indirect input with direct input or pen input [16,38]. Ray-casting techniques are easily understood by users and provide a convenient solution to the problem of reach.…”

“…Ray-casting techniques are easily understood by users and provide a convenient solution to the problem of reach. However, they have also been shown to be susceptible to tremor and parallax [23,29]. Performance with this kind of technique has been modeled but, to our knowledge, only in environments with large front displays and not when the displays surround the user (e.g., [23,24]).…”

TutoriVR

“…Finally, we added various timeline navigation aids. Seeking a video timeline in VR using the touch controller might be slow and tiring because of hand jitters [9,25]. We added the -5s/+5s seeking buttons and the section navigation buttons ( Figure 3 V.1) to aid in video navigation…”

E-Pad

“…Large displays are increasingly popular and well adapted for public settings. Ray casting methods [5,8,14,18,19] and tablet based gestures [13] are usually used to interact with these displays. However, although these techniques perform well for targeting and tracing [8], they can lead to major issues.…”