An Evaluation of Two Input Devices for Remote Pointing

Remote pointing is an interaction style for presentation systems, interactive TV, and other systems where the user is positioned an appreciable distance from the display. A variety of technologies and interaction techniques exist for remote pointing. This paper presents an empirical evaluation and comparison of two remote pointing devices. A standard mouse is used as a base-line condition. Using the ISO metric throughput (calculated from users' speed and accuracy in completing tasks) as the criterion, the two remote pointing devices performed poorly, demonstrating 32% and 65% worse performance than the mouse. Qualitatively, users indicated a strong preference for the mouse over the remote pointing devices. Implications for the design of present and future systems for remote pointing are discussed.

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