Target Expansion in Context: the Case of Menu in Handheld Augmented Reality

Target expansion techniques facilitate pointing by enlarging the effective sizes of targets. As opposed to the numerous studies on target expansion solely focusing on optimizing pointing, we study the compound task of pointing at a Point of Interest (POI) and then interacting with the POI menu in handheld Augmented Reality (AR). A POI menu in AR has a fixed position because it contains relevant information about its location in the real world. We present two techniques that make the cursor jump to the closest opened POI menu after pointing at a POI. Our experimental results show that 1) for selecting a POI the expansion techniques are 31 % faster than the baseline screen-centered crosshair pointing technique, 2) the expansion techniques with/without a jumping cursor to the closest opened POI menu offer similar performances and 3) Touch relative pointing is preferred by participants because it minimizes physical movements.