Utilization of Orientation Information of Pointing Device for Improved Target Acquisition Technique

Description

As the increase in both size and resolution of computer displays, users of GUI environment are required to make precise pointing to acquire small interface elements with long movement over the large display using conventional point cursor. Several techniques have been proposed to attempt to improve the pointing performance, however most of these techniques mainly consider the distribution of UI elements and/or cursor’s location and speed, but few of them consider the dynamic orientation information of the cursor and computer mouse movement.In this proposal we introduce the design of new target acquisition techniques, including a new type of area cursor that couples the cursor’s activation area with its speed and orientation of motion, and a new cursor location altering technique based on the physical orientation of the computer mouse. Our new area cursor technique minimizes spatial cursor movement and allows user to acquire distant target without requiring it is under the cursor or being the closest target to the cursor. And the physical orientation based altering technique allows the cursor to pass through long distant over large display, without having large physical mouse movement. We expect our new techniques will outperforms the traditional point cursor and existing area cursor techniques, particularly in terms of cursor moving time and mouse moving distant.