Design and evaluation of interaction models for multi-touch mice

  • Authors:

  • Hrvoje Benko;Shahram Izadi;Andrew D. Wilson;Xiang Cao;Dan Rosenfeld;Ken Hinckley

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, UK;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA;Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, UK;Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2010
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Adding multi-touch sensing to the surface of a mouse has the potential to substantially increase the number of interactions available to the user. However, harnessing this increased bandwidth is challenging, since the user must perform multi-touch interactions while holding the device and using it as a regular mouse. In this paper we describe the design challenges and formalize the design space of multi-touch mice interactions. From our design space categories we synthesize four interaction models which enable the use of both multi-touch and mouse interactions on the same device. We describe the results of a controlled user experiment evaluating the performance of these models in a 2D spatial manipulation task typical of touch-based interfaces and compare them to interacting directly on a multi-touch screen and with a regular mouse. We observed that our multi-touch mouse interactions were overall slower than the chosen baselines; however, techniques providing a single focus of interaction and explicit touch activation yielded better performance and higher preferences from our participants. Our results expose the difficulties in designing multi-touch mice interactions and define the problem space for future research in making these devices effective.