How small can you go?: analyzing the effect of visual angle in pointing tasks

  • Authors:
  • Juan Pablo Hourcade;Natasha Bullock-Rest

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, United States;University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, United States

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

People are increasingly using wireless mice from across rooms as they use computers as entertainment centers. As a consequence, they often have to point at targets occupying small visual angles. In this note we present the results of a study on pointing performance for targets occupying small visual angles. Our results suggest there is a steep degradation of pointing performance in both accuracy and speed for targets occupying a visual angle below 3 minutes of arc.