Abstract

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.