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Towards accurate cursorless pointing: the effects of ocular dominance and handedness

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Abstract

Pointing gestures are our natural way of referencing distant objects and thus widely used in HCI for controlling devices. Due to current pointing models’ inherent inaccuracies, most of the systems using pointing gestures so far rely on visual feedback showing users where they point at. However, in many environments, e.g., smart homes, it is rarely possible to display cursors since most devices do not contain a display. Therefore, we raise the question of how to facilitate accurate pointing-based interaction in a cursorless context. In this paper we present two user studies showing that previous cursorless techniques are rather inaccurate as they lack important considerations about users’ characteristics that would help in minimizing inaccuracy. We show that pointing accuracy could be significantly improved by acknowledging users’ handedness and ocular dominance. In a first user study (n= 33), we reveal the large effect of ocular dominance and handedness on human pointing behavior. Current ray-casting techniques neglect both ocular dominance and handedness as effects onto pointing behavior, precluding them from accurate cursorless selection. With a second user study (n= 25), we show that accounting for ocular dominance and handedness yields to significantly more accurate selections compared to two previously published ray-casting techniques. This speaks for the importance of considering users’ characteristics further to develop better selection techniques to foster more robust accurate selections.

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Acknowledgements

This work was conducted within the Emmy Noether research group Mobile Interaction with Pervasive User Interfaces funded by DFG and the SenseEmotion project funded by BMBF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Insitute of Media Informatics, Ulm University, Helmholtzstraße 16, 89081, Ulm, Germany

    Katrin Plaumann, Matthias Weing, Christian Winkler, Michael Müller & Enrico Rukzio

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  1. Katrin Plaumann
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  2. Matthias Weing
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  3. Christian Winkler
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  4. Michael Müller
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Correspondence to Katrin Plaumann.

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Plaumann, K., Weing, M., Winkler, C. et al. Towards accurate cursorless pointing: the effects of ocular dominance and handedness. Pers Ubiquit Comput 22, 633–646 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-1100-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-1100-7

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