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How small can you go?: analyzing the effect of visual angle in pointing tasks

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

People are increasingly using wireless mice from across rooms as they use computers as entertainment centers. As a consequence, they often have to point at targets occupying small visual angles. In this note we present the results of a study on pointing performance for targets occupying small visual angles. Our results suggest there is a steep degradation of pointing performance in both accuracy and speed for targets occupying a visual angle below 3 minutes of arc.

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Blanch, R., Guiard, Y. & Beaudouin-Lafon, M. (2004). Semantic Pointing: Improving Target Acquisition with Control-Display Ratio Adaptation. Proceedings of CHI 2004. ACM Press: pp. 519--526.
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Hourcade, J. P., Nguyen, C. M., Perry, K. B. and Denburg, N. L. (2010). PointAssist for Older Adults: Analyzing Sub-Movement Characteristics to Aid in Pointing Tasks. Proceedings of CHI 20 ACM Press: pp. 1115--1124.
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Cited By

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  • (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
  • (2023)Exploring Users' Pointing Performance on Virtual and Physical Large Curved DisplaysProceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology10.1145/3611659.3615710(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Exploring Users Pointing Performance on Large Displays with Different Curvatures in Virtual RealityIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332024229:11(4535-4545)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2012
    3276 pages
    ISBN:9781450310154
    DOI:10.1145/2207676
    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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    Published: 05 May 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. accuracy
    2. efficiency
    3. pointing
    4. visual angle

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    View all
    • (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
    • (2023)Exploring Users' Pointing Performance on Virtual and Physical Large Curved DisplaysProceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology10.1145/3611659.3615710(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Exploring Users Pointing Performance on Large Displays with Different Curvatures in Virtual RealityIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332024229:11(4535-4545)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
    • (2022)ViewfinderVR: configurable viewfinder for selection of distant objects in VRVirtual Reality10.1007/s10055-022-00649-z26:4(1573-1592)Online publication date: 6-May-2022
    • (2018)Pointing All Around YouProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3174107(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
    • (2015)Differences in Perspective and Software ScalingProceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/2788940.2794366(128-128)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2015
    • (2015)Uniform vs. non-uniform scaling of shooter games on large displays2015 IEEE Games Entertainment Media Conference (GEM)10.1109/GEM.2015.7377210(1-8)Online publication date: Oct-2015
    • (2014)Screen scalingCHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2559206.2581227(2053-2058)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2014
    • (2013)Exploring the effect of display size on pointing performanceProceedings of the 2013 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces10.1145/2512349.2514911(389-392)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2013

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