A Study Of Application Techniques Based On Area Cursor For Multi-touch Devices

With the popularity of multi-touch devices,pointing techniques for multi-touch devices also faces some new problems.First,when we interact with wall-sized multitouch devices,there are sometimes some objects that are out of our reach.In addition,there are issues such as visual occlusion,low pointing accuracy,and low efficiency of multi-selection on multi-touch devices.In order to address all the aforementioned issues,we proposed an extended cursor(Stick Cursor,SC)that can be controlled autonomously for multi-touch devices.The SC supports seamless switching between single and multiple selections.We invited 12 subjects to evaluate the usability of SC under different conditions(i.e.,single and multiple selection,object arrangements,object sizes,and full-state and preset versions)in an experiment.The experimental results showed that the mean time per trial of single selection in the last block was approximately 1 or 2.5 seconds with or without the cursor dimension presetting,respectively;that of multiple selection was correspondingly 1.3 or 3.2 seconds.However,with or without the cursor dimension presetting,the mean selection time of each target in the multiple selection task reduced to approximately 0.2 or 0.5 seconds,respectively.In the last block,mean error rates reduced to 0.8% and 1.1% for the SC with and without presetting,respectively.In conclusion,the preset version SC outperformed the full state version SC in terms of speed,accuracy and subjective preference.We found that the subjects did not have difficulty in operating the SC to select targets.Selection-action operation pattern is an important research topic in the field of human-computer interaction.However,the existing selection-action pattern has a limited number of supported operational commands and limited support for command parameter settings.And a lot of research on selection-action are based on pen-operated systems.We proposed a seamless “selection-action” interactive tool for multi-touch devices and illustrated the usage of the tool in a specific application scenario.In this scenario,we presented:(1)selecting single or multiple targets in a seamless switching mode;(2)localizing pop-up menus through touch operations,providing quick access to commands without repeated round trips between work and command areas,avoiding the transfer of focus of user attention and improving interaction performance;(3)merging command selection and direct manipulation,making selection-action patterns be performed continuously,fluidly,and unambiguously.