PR-Cone-Casting

Also known as Progressive refinement cone casting

In handheld AR, touching the screen casts a cone through the camera view, a sideways swipe widens or narrows it, and the objects inside appear as 2D clones around a ring cursor so the target can be tapped.

How it works

One-handed on a phone. Touching sets the cone's direction under a ring cursor and swiping left or right changes the apex angle. The candidates inside the cone are shown as flat clones arranged near the ring, and tapping a clone selects that object, so hidden objects are reachable. On an iPhone 6 with 12 participants (targets 0.2–1 cm, 20–80% occluded), error rates were 0.25% for PR-Bubble-Cursor, 1.2% for PR-Cone-Casting, 2.7% for touch Go-Go, 4.4% for 2D-Grid-Cursor, 5% for Offset-Ray-Casting and 41% for touch raycasting; times were 0.44 s for raycasting, 0.68 s PR-Cone, 1.22 s Offset, 1.29 s PR-Bubble, 2.06 s Grid and 2.75 s Go-Go. PR-Bubble-Cursor was preferred.

Papers

Jibin Yin, Chengyao Fu, Xiangliang Zhang, Tao Liu (2019). Precise Target Selection Techniques in Handheld Augmented Reality Interfaces. IEEE Access 7, 17663-17674 doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2895219
Becky Spittle, Maite Frutos-Pascual, Chris Creed, Ian Williams (2023). A Review of Interaction Techniques for Immersive Environments. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics doi:10.1109/tvcg.2022.3174805