Proximal and distal selection of widgets

Abstract

A smartphone having touchscreen and short-range networking facilities makes efficient remote control for a large display. In this paper, we report on the results of a case study examining the user performance of Proximal Selection (PS) and Distal Selection (DS) of remote control widgets. DS uses a mobile pointer to zoom-in the region of interest and select the widgets on the large display. PS involves pointing at the large display to transfer the zoom-in view of the pointed region onto the mobile touchscreen and make selections thereafter. The experimental results indicate that PS outperforms DS in terms of speed and user satisfaction with physical effort involved especially in complex tasks requiring multiple widget selection. DS was found to be favorable for simple tasks as it has lower error rate and it does not require attention switch between the mobile and the large display.