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No more bricolage!: methods and tools to characterize, replicate and compare pointing transfer functions

Published: 16 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Transfer functions are the only pointing facilitation technique actually used in modern graphical interfaces involving the indirect control of an on-screen cursor. But despite their general use, very little is known about them. We present EchoMouse, a device we created to characterize the transfer functions of any system, and libpointing, a toolkit that we developed to replicate and compare the ones used by Windows, OS X and Xorg. We describe these functions and report on an experiment that compared the default one of the three systems. Our results show that these default functions improve performance up to 24% compared to a unitless constant CD gain. We also found significant differences between them, with the one from OS X improving performance for small target widths but reducing its performance up to 9% for larger ones compared to Windows and Xorg. These results notably suggest replacing the constant CD gain function commonly used by HCI researchers by the default function of the considered systems.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '11: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2011
    654 pages
    ISBN:9781450307161
    DOI:10.1145/2047196
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 October 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. CD gain
    2. control-display gain functions
    3. pointer acceleration
    4. pointing
    5. toolkit
    6. transfer functions

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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    • (2024)Practical approaches to group-level multi-objective Bayesian optimization in interaction technique designCollective Intelligence10.1177/263391372412413133:1Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Exploring Pointer Enhancement Techniques for Target Selection on Large Curved DisplayProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36981358:ISS(214-235)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Second Workshop on Engineering Interactive Systems Embedding AI TechnologiesCompanion Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems10.1145/3660515.3662837(103-107)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
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    • (2024)Relative Merits of Nominal and Effective Indexes of Difficulty of Fitts’ Law: Effects of Sample Size and the Number of Repetitions on Model FitInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.230320141:1(574-591)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2024
    • (2023)Velocity-Oriented Dynamic Control–Display Gain for Kinesthetic Interaction with a Grounded Force-Feedback DeviceMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti70200127:2(12)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2023
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