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 baseline 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.
I. Scott MacKenzie, Shaidah Jusoh