Usability benchmarks for motion tracking systems

Abstract

Precise, accurate, fast, and low-latency motion tracking is a core requirement of real-time human-computer interfaces. The choices of tracking systems for a particular set of 3D interaction techniques are manifold. Hence, guidance in this task is greatly beneficial. In this paper, we propose to establish a set of canonical and simple game-based benchmarks for a potentially standardised comparison of tracking systems. The benchmarks focus on usability scores given reoccurring interaction tasks without requiring potentially missing, incomplete, or complex latency or accuracy raw measurements. Our first two benchmarks evaluate three tracking systems regarding motion-parallax and 3D object manipulation techniques. Our usability comparisons confirmed an expected advantage of low-latency/high-accuracy systems, while they also demonstrated that certain tracking systems perform better than suggested by previous measurements of their raw performances. This indicates that our approach provides an adequate replacement and improvement over the pure comparison of technical specifications. We believe our benchmarks could benefit the research community by facilitating a usability-based comparison of motion tracking systems.