Overhead

Recently I had occasion to hook my laptop up to a television, to watch some video, and afterward left the connection active for a while even though I was working on the laptop screen. Something which struck me fairly quickly: The desktop, mirrored on the TV screen, became a different object entirely--foreign and nonsensical. The television in particular seems key here, because I've never had this impression when working on a projected LCD screen. It may be that my learned expectations for what I see on TV are more fluid, finely honed, and crafted for smooth entertainment.

Most noteworthy were the cursor movements. What seems quick and efficient on the desktop was painfully slow and awkward to view on the TV screen. When I became a viewer rather than a user (even though I was still controlling the mouse) I lost the cognitive excuse for what were suddenly interminable delays. The second or two to move the cursor from point A to point B were frustrating because the shift in viewing medium confounded my mind's usual subconscious tricks whereby I direct my attention to the effort required to accomplish the task, rather than the task or the goal I want to accomplish.

This made me consider the efficiency of our current input devices in a new light. Even HCI experts generally take for granted that the mouse is an efficient input device, and focus on other aspects of the system. But how much is it really? Something more than a keyboard is required to navigate a 2D GUI, but I wonder how much time we spend in a day actually moving the mouse, rather than working with what it brings...Eye movement detection is the holy grail here, but is likely still many years off. What alternatives are there today?