The mouse wheel may induce physical fatigue by requiring users to clutch the wheel repeatedly when scrolling long distances. To address this problem, some mouse products provide a free-spinning mode in which users can spin the wheel to initiate inertial scrolling. However, the time and effort required to toggle the free-spinning mode may lower the usability of the mouse wheel. To enable inertial scrolling without the overhead of mode switching, we present TouchWheel, a physical mouse wheel with touch sensitivity and a virtual wheel model that enables users to perform flick-and-stop operations as they do on touchscreens. A user experiment revealed that participants could actively use TouchWheel’s flick-and-stop operation according to their different scrolling needs. For tasks that frequently required long-distance scrolling, TouchWheel outperformed a normal mouse wheel in task completion time and required fewer clutching and mode-switching actions than the normal mouse wheel and a spin-enabled mouse wheel. For tasks that required short-distance scrolling, TouchWheel performed similarly to other baseline options.

We present Lattice Menu, a gaze-based marking menu utilizing a lattice of visual anchors that helps perform accurate gaze pointing for menu item selection. Users who know the location of the desired item can leverage target-assisted gaze gestures for multilevel item selection by looking at visual anchors over the gaze trajectories. Our evaluation showed that Lattice Menu exhibits a considerably low error rate (~1%) and a quick menu selection time (1.3-1.6 s) for expert usage across various menu structures (4 × 4 × 4 and 6 × 6 × 6) and sizes (8, 10 and 12°). In comparison with a traditional gaze-based marking menu that does not utilize visual targets, Lattice Menu showed remarkably (~5 times) fewer menu selection errors for expert usage. In a post-interview, all 12 subjects preferred Lattice Menu, and most subjects (8 out of 12) commented that the provisioning of visual targets facilitated more stable menu selections with reduced eye fatigue.

In first-person shooters (FPS), professional players (a.k.a., Gosu) outperform amateur players. The secrets behind the performance of professional FPS players have been debated in online communities with many conjectures; however, attempts of scientific verification have been limited. We addressed this conundrum through a data-collection study of the gameplay of eight professional and eight amateur players in the commercial FPS Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The collected data cover behavioral data from six sensors (motion capture, eye tracker, mouse, keyboard, electromyography armband, and pulse sensor) and in-game data (player data and event logs). We examined conjectures in four categories: aiming, character movement, physicality, and device and settings. Only 6 out of 13 conjectures were supported with statistically sufficient evidence.

In gaming, accurately rendering input signals on a display is crucial, both spatially and temporally. However, the asynchronicity between the input and output signal frequencies results in unstable responses called jitter. A recent research modeled this jitter mathematically [2]; however, the effect of jitter on human performance is unknown. In this study, we investigated the empirical effect of asynchronicity-induced jitter using a state-of-the-art high-performance mouse and monitor device. In the first part, perceptual user experience under different jitter levels was examined using the ISO 4120:2004 triangle test protocol, and a jitter of over 0.3 ms could be perceived by sensitive subjects. In the second part, we measured the pointing task performance for different jitter levels using the ISO 9241-9 (i.e., Fitts’ law) test, and found that the pointing performance was unaffected up to a jitter of 1 ms. Finally, we recommended display and mouse combinations based on our results, which indicated the need for a higher mouse polling rate than that of the current standard 1000-Hz USB mouse.