We present the design and evaluation of the vacuum, a new
interaction technique that enables quick access to items on
areas of a large display that are difficult for a user to reach
without significant physical movement. The vacuum is a
circular widget with a user controllable arc of influence that
is centered at the widget’s point of invocation and spans out
to the edges of the display. Far away objects residing inside
this influence arc are brought closer to the widget’s centre
in the form of proxies that can be manipulated in lieu of the
original. We conducted two experiments which compare the
vacuum to direct picking and an existing technique called
drag-and-pick [2]. Results show that the vacuum
outperforms existing techniques when selecting multiple
targets in a sequence, performs similarly to existing
techniques when selecting single targets located moderately
far away, and slightly worse with single targets located very
far away in the presence of distracter targets along the path.