Surfpad: riding towards targets on a squeeze film effect

We present Surfpad, a pointing facilitation technique that does not decrease target distance or increase target width in either control or display space. This new technique operates instead in the tactile domain by taking advantage of the ability to alter a touchpad’s coefficient of friction by means of a squeeze film effect. We report on three experiments comparing Surfpad to the Semantic Pointing technique and constant control-display gain with and without distractor targets. Our results clearly show the limits of traditional targetaware control-display gain adaptation in the latter case, and the benefits of our tactile approach in both cases. Surfpad leads to a performance improvement close to 9% compared to unassisted pointing at small targets with no distractor. It is also robust to high distractor densities, keeping an average performance improvement of nearly 10% while Semantic Pointing can degrade up to 100%. Our results also suggest the performance improvement is caused ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Géry Casiez, Nicolas Roussel, Romuald Vanbelleghem, Frédéric Giraud
• Keywords: CHI 2011, Facilitation Technique, Graphical User Interfaces, Human Computer Interaction, Target Width