Increasing the Precision of Distant Pointing for Large High-Resolution Displays

Kopper, Regis and Silva, Mara G. and McMahan, Ryan P. and Bowman, Doug A. (2008) Increasing the Precision of Distant Pointing for Large High-Resolution Displays. Technical Report TR-08-17, Computer Science, Virginia Tech.

Abstract

Distant pointing at large displays allows rapid cursor movements, but can be problematic when high levels of precision are needed, due to natural hand tremor and track-ing jitter. We present two ray-casting-based interaction techniques for large high-resolution displays – Absolute and Relative Mapping (ARM) Ray-casting and Zooming for Enhanced Large Display Acuity (ZELDA) – that ad-dress this precision problem. ZELDA enhances precision by providing a zoom window, which increases target sizes resulting in greater precision and visual acuity. ARM Ray-casting increases user control over the cursor position by allowing the user to activate and deactivate relative map-ping as the need for precise manipulation arises. The results of an empirical study show that both approaches improve performance on high-precision tasks when compared to basic ray-casting. In realistic use, however, performance of the techniques is highly dependent on user strategy.