Architectural Presentation with Laser Pointers on a Projection Screen

In a conventional group meeting environment with digital content presented on screen, the discussion may be dominated by a presenter who has the control of the computer. Being widely used in meetings, laser pointer is a potential tool that can tackle this problem. This paper describes a novel use of laser pointers in architectural presentations. A laser pointing system designed for a projec-tor-and-screen environment was developed. The performance and usability of the system were tested. A controlled user experiment was carried out to compare the laser pointer with other interacting devices, including a mouse, a stylus, a track-point and a TabletPC. The usability was tested by using the system in a real application. Details of the laser pointing system, the experiments and the results are reported in this paper.