Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

Rake Cursor: Improving Pointing Performance with Concurrent Input Channels

In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2009). pages 1415-1418. 2009.

Renaud Blanch, Michael Ortega

Résumé

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.