Surfpad: Riding Towards Targets on a Squeeze Film Effect

Archive ouverte : Communication dans un congrès

Casiez, Géry | Roussel, Nicolas | Vanbelleghem, Romuald | Giraud, Frédéric

Edité par HAL CCSD

International audience. 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 oper- ates 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 tar- gets. Our results clearly show the limits of traditional target- aware 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 aver- age performance improvement of nearly 10% while Seman- tic Pointing can degrade up to 100%. Our results also sug- gest the performance improvement is caused by tactile in- formation feedback rather than mechanical causes, and that the feedback is more effective when friction is increased on targets using a simple step function.

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