Design and Comparative Evaluation of Smoothed Pointing: a Velocity-oriented Remote Pointing Enhancement Technique

The increasing use of remote pointing devices in various application domains is fostering the adoption of pointing enhancement techniques which are aimed at counterbalancing the shortcomings of desk-free interaction. This paper describes the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods for ray pointing facilitation, and presents a refinement of Smoothed Pointing, an auto-calibrating velocity-oriented precision enhancing technique. Furthermore, the paper discusses the results of a user study aimed at empirically investigating how velocity-oriented approaches perform in target acquisition and in trajectory-based interaction tasks, considering both laser-style and image-plane pointing modalities. The experiments, carried out in a low precision scenario in which a Wiimote was used both as a wand and a tracking system, show that Smoothed Pointing allows a significant decrease in the error rate and achieves the highest values of throughput in trajectory-based tasks. The results also indicate that the effectiveness of precision enhancing techniques is significantly affected by the pointing modality and the type of pointing task.