Paper

banerjee, A., burstyn, J., girouard, a. and vertegaal, r. Pointable - An In-Air Pointing technique to Manipulate Out-of-Reach Targets on Tabletops. in proceedings of ACM its11 conference on interactive tabletops and surfaces, 2011.

abstract

Selecting and moving digital content on interactive tab- letops often involves accessing the workspace beyond arms’ reach. We present Pointable, an in-air, bimanual per- spective-based input technique that augments touch input on a tabletop for distant content. With Pointable, the domi- nant hand selects remote targets, while the non-dominant hand can be used to scale and rotate targets with a variable C/D gain. We conducted 3 experiments; the first showed that pointing at a distance using Pointable has a Fitts’ throughput comparable to that of a mouse. In the second experiment, we found that Pointable had the same perfor- mance to multi-touch tabletop input in a resize, rotate and drag task. In a third study, we observed that when given the choice, over 75% of participants preferred to use Pointable over multi-touch for target manipulation. In general, Pointable allows users to manipulate out-of-reach targets without loss of performance while minimizing the need to lean, stand up, or involve collocated collaborators.