Interacting at a distance: measuring the performance of laser pointers and other devices

  • Authors:

  • Brad A. Myers;Rishi Bhatnagar;Jeffrey Nichols;Choon Hong Peck;Dave Kong;Robert Miller;A. Chris Long

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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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 卤8 pixels, which can be reduced to about 卤2 to 卤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