HeadShift: Head Pointing with Dynamic Control-Display Gain

TY - JOUR

T1 - HeadShift

T2 - Head Pointing with Dynamic Control-Display Gain

AU - Wang, Haopeng

AU - Sidenmark, Ludwig

AU - Weidner, Florian

AU - Newn, Joshua

AU - Gellersen, Hans

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

PY - 2025/4/19

Y1 - 2025/4/19

N2 - Head pointing is widely used for hands-free input in head-mounted displays (HMDs). The primary role of head movement in an HMD is to control the viewport based on absolute mapping of head rotation to the 3D environment. Head pointing is conventionally supported by the same 1:1 mapping of input with a cursor fixed in the centre of the view, but this requires exaggerated head movement and limits input granularity. In this work, we propose to adopt dynamic gain to improve ergonomics and precision and introduce the HeadShift technique. The design of HeadShift is grounded in natural eye-head coordination to manage control of the viewport and the cursor at different speeds. We evaluated HeadShift in a Fitts' Law experiment and on three different applications in VR, finding the technique to reduce error rate and effort. The findings are significant as they show that gain can be adopted effectively for head pointing while ensuring that the cursor is maintained within a comfortable eye-in-head viewing range.

AB - Head pointing is widely used for hands-free input in head-mounted displays (HMDs). The primary role of head movement in an HMD is to control the viewport based on absolute mapping of head rotation to the 3D environment. Head pointing is conventionally supported by the same 1:1 mapping of input with a cursor fixed in the centre of the view, but this requires exaggerated head movement and limits input granularity. In this work, we propose to adopt dynamic gain to improve ergonomics and precision and introduce the HeadShift technique. The design of HeadShift is grounded in natural eye-head coordination to manage control of the viewport and the cursor at different speeds. We evaluated HeadShift in a Fitts' Law experiment and on three different applications in VR, finding the technique to reduce error rate and effort. The findings are significant as they show that gain can be adopted effectively for head pointing while ensuring that the cursor is maintained within a comfortable eye-in-head viewing range.

KW - Control-Display Gain

KW - Head Mounted Display

KW - Pointing

KW - Virtual Reality

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105003951602&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3689434

DO - 10.1145/3689434

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:105003951602

SN - 1073-0516

VL - 32

JO - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

JF - ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

IS - 1

M1 - 2

ER -