The bubble cursor: enhancing target acquisition by dynamic resizing of the cursor's activation area

Authors:
Tovi Grossman;Ravin Balakrishnan
Affiliations:
University of Toronto, Canada;University of Toronto, Canada
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2005

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Abstract

We present the bubble cursor - a new target acquisition technique based on area cursors. The bubble cursor improves upon area cursors by dynamically resizing its activation area depending on the proximity of surrounding targets, such that only one target is selectable at any time. We also present two controlled experiments that evaluate bubble cursor performance in 1D and 2D target acquisition tasks, in complex situations with multiple targets of varying layout densities. Results show that the bubble cursor significantly outperforms the point cursor and the object pointing technique [7], and that bubble cursor performance can be accurately modeled and predicted using Fitts' law.