3D Selection Vault

Kuiper Belt

Also known as Out-of-natural-angle menu

Point at an object with your head and pick an action by looking at a menu item placed far out at the edge of your eye range (25–45° from the head direction), where gaze rarely goes by accident.

How it works

Natural gaze rarely moves more than 25° from the head direction, although the eyes can reach about 45°. Kuiper Belt places head-fixed menu items in this 'out-of-natural-angle' ring (32° upward, 37° elsewhere, with 12° items to cover the lower gaze accuracy there), so that visual search does not trigger them. The head pointer picks the target object and a short dwell on a ring item selects the command, which separates searching (with gaze in the comfortable zone) from selecting. Study 1 (N=10, HTC Vive Pro Eye) mapped error and comfort across ring distances and directions; upward items were hardest. In Study 2 (N=18) a visual-search-and-colour task was compared with two-step gaze dwell selection and with the same menu at 12°: Kuiper Belt had the fewest Midas-touch errors, especially at 200 ms dwell, the best usability and lowest workload.

Papers