Targeting across displayless space

Abstract

Multi-monitor displays and multi-display environments are now common. Cross-display cursor movement, in which a user moves the pointer from one display to another, occurs frequently in these settings. There are several techniques for supporting this kind of movement, and these differ in the way that they deal with displayless space (the physical space between displays). Stitching is the method used by most operating systems; in this technique, the cursor jumps from the edge of one display directly into the next display. In contrast, Mouse Ether maps the motor space of the mouse exactly to the physical space of the displays, meaning that the cursor has to travel across displayless space until it reaches the next display. To determine which of these approaches is best for cross-display movement, we carried out a study comparing Stitching, Mouse Ether, and a variant of Mouse Ether with Halo for off-screen feedback. We found that Stitching is equivalent to or faster than any variant of Mouse Ether, and that Halo improves Ether's performance (but not enough to outperform Stitching). Results also indicate that the larger the gap between displays, the longer the targeting takes -even for Stitching. These findings provide valuable guidance for practitioners and raise new interesting questions for research.

Cross-device gaze-supported point-to-point content transfer

“…Transfer between such displays involves inherent displayless space i.e., the gap between coplanar displays. Further work showed that accounting for this space in motor-controlled input does not improve performance [Nacenta et al 2008]. In mobile settings, Touch Projector mapped touches from a smartphone, through its rear camera, to displays in the environment to enable remote interaction [Boring et al 2010].…”

The ASPECTA toolkit

“…Finally, our own Ubiquitous Cursor research prototype is a precursor of ASPECTA which uses the same kind of hardware setup with the specific purpose of providing visual feedback for indirect input (e.g., mouse input) in what has been termed "displayless" space [30]. Although the ASPECTA toolkit inherits the hardware approach based on a hemispherical mirror, it is not constrained to it and it provides an API and configuration algorithm to enable the implementation of other, more generic, applications.…”

Automatic configuration of spatially consistent mouse pointer navigation in multi-display environments

“…Finally, perspective cursor control requires the user to navigate display-less space blindly. However, recent research [7] has shown that warping the mouse pointer across large gaps between displays is superior to a mouse ether approach. This finding is particularly important for multi-user setups, which often employ spatially separated displays (e.g., a conference table in the center and surrounding wall displays).…”

“…To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. mance is affected by discontinuities in the spatial display arrangement [10,7] and the user's location within the environment [6,8]. Spatially consistent mouse pointer navigation techniques aim to accommodate for these discontinuities by creating cross-display transitions taking the spatial display arrangement into account.…”