StabilizAR: Enabling Hands-Free Head Pointing while Mobile

DOI

Wearable Augmented Reality headsets are inherently mobile: they enable hands-free and immersive interaction while on the go. Despite this, research into input methods that cater to mobility issues, such as the instabilities introduced by canonical tasks such as walking, remains in its infancy. This paper addresses this omission by presenting StabilizAR, a technique to enhance head cursor input while walking. It introduces a novel cursor velocity limit activated by the mutual alignment of head and eye vectors that enhances fine-grained targeting without compromising input speed during large-scale cursor motion. It integrates this with a target scoring system that reduces the precision required during selection by accruing proximity-based estimates of a user's intended target. Two studies show these combined techniques dramatically increase targeting performance---boosting success rates from 6% to 91% while mobile---and elevate measures of usability and user preference. They show StabilizAR's potential to enable genuinely mobile HMD use.