Related paper G. Casiez and N. Roussel. No more bricolage! Methods and tools to characterize, replicate and compare pointing transfer functions. In Proceedings of UIST'11, the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 2011. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 603-614. [DOI]

Abstract - Transfer functions are the only pointing facilitation technique actually used in modern graphical interfaces involving the indirect control of an on-screen cursor. But despite their general use, very little is known about them. We present EchoMouse, a device we created to characterize the transfer functions of any system, and libpointing, a toolkit that we developed to replicate and compare the ones used by Windows, OS X and Xorg. We describe these functions and report on an experiment that compared the default one of the three systems. Our results show that these default functions improve performance up to 24% compared to a unitless constant CD gain. We also found significant differences between them, with the one from OSX improving performance for small target widths but reducing its performance up to 9% for larger ones compared to Windows and Xorg. These results notably suggest replacing the constant CD gain function commonly used by HCI researchers by the default function of the considered systems.

Features

• Handles raw information from multiple HID pointing devices
• Retrieves physical characteristics from display devices
• Supports modern transfer functions: Windows (XP, Vista, 7), OS X and Xorg
• Ease the design of new transfer functions
• Use event dispatching, not polling
• Easy configuration through URI
• Works on most platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac
• Java and Python bindings

Contributors

• Nicolas Roussel
• Géry Casiez
• Damien Marchal
• Mark Cranness
• Paolo Olivo

Licence libpointing can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Ad-hoc licences can be provided upon request. We appreciate credit when you use it (cite the UIST paper), but don't require it.