Rake cursor: improving pointing performance with concurrent input channels

We investigate the use of two concurrent input channels to perform a pointing task. The first channel is the traditional mouse input device whereas the second one is the gaze posi-tion. The rake cursor interaction technique combines a grid of cursors controlled by the mouse and the selection of the active cursor by the gaze. A controlled experiment shows that rake cursor pointing drastically outperforms mouse-only pointing and also significantly outperforms the state of the art of pointing techniques mixing gaze and mouse input. A theory explaining the improvement is proposed: the global difficulty of a task is split between those two channels, and the sub-tasks could partly be performed concurrently. Author Keywords Fitts ’ law, multi-channel pointing, rake cursor