Rake cursor: improving pointing performance with concurrent input channels

  • Authors:
  • Renaud Blanch;Michaël Ortega

  • Affiliations:
  • Université Joseph Fourier - Grenoble 1, Grenoble, France;CNRS, Grenoble, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We investigate the use of two concurrent input channels to perform a pointing task. The first channel is the traditional mouse input device whereas the second one is the gaze position. The rake cursor interaction technique combines a grid of cursors controlled by the mouse and the selection of the active cursor by the gaze. A controlled experiment shows that rake cursor pointing drastically outperforms mouse-only pointing and also significantly outperforms the state of the art of pointing techniques mixing gaze and mouse input. A theory explaining the improvement is proposed: the global difficulty of a task is split between those two channels, and the sub-tasks could partly be performed concurrently.