Facilitating System Control in Ray-based Interaction Tasks

Abstract

This paper investigates the usability of tracked wands equipped
with additional input sensors for system control tasks in 3D interaction
scenarios. We integrated a thumb-operated circular touchpad
into a hand-held wand and compared the performance of our input
device to common ray-based interaction in a menu selection and
parameter adjustment task. The results show that both interfaces
can be highly efficient, but ray-based interaction is only competitive
if large-sized graphical interface representations are provided.
In contrast, touchpad input performs well independent of the size of
the graphical elements due to proprioceptive and tactile feedback.