The vacuum: facilitating the manipulation of distant objects

We present the design and evaluation of the vacuum, a new interaction technique that enables quick access to items on areas of a large display that are difficult for a user to reach without significant physical movement. The vacuum is a circular widget with a user controllable arc of influence that is centered at the widget's point of invocation and spans out to the edges of the display. Far away objects residing inside this influence arc are brought closer to the widget's centre in the form of proxies that can be manipulated in lieu of the original. We conducted two experiments which compare the vacuum to direct picking and an existing technique called drag-and-pick [2]. Results show that the vacuum outperforms existing techniques when selecting multiple targets in a sequence, performs similarly to existing techniques when selecting single targets located moderately far away, and slightly worse with single targets located very far away in the presence of distracter targets ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Anastasia Bezerianos, Ravin Balakrishnan
• Keywords: CHI 2005, Human Computer Interaction, Multiple Targets, Single Targets, User Controllable Arc