Binocular cursor: enabling selection on transparent displays troubled by binocular parallax

Abstract

Binocular parallax is a problem for any interaction system that has a transparent display and objects behind it, as users will see duplicated and overlapped images. In this note, we propose a quantitative measure called Binocular Selectability Discriminant (BSD) to predict the ability of the user to perform selection task in such a setup. In addition, we propose a technique called Binocular Cursor (BC) which takes advantage of this duplicating and overlapping phenomenon, rather than being hampered by it, to resolve binocular selection ambiguity by visualizing the correct selection point. An experiment shows that selection with BC is not slower than monocular selection, and that it can be significantly more precise, depending on the design of BC.