Analysis of Performance Resulting from the Design of Selected Hand-Held Input Control Devices and Visual Displays

Since the introduction of graphical user interfaces (GUI), input control devices have become an integral part of desktop computing. When interfacing with GUIs, these input control devices have become the human's primary means of communicating with the computer. Although there have been a number of experiments conducted on pointing devices for desktop machine, there is little research on pointing devices for wearable computer technology. This is surprising because pointing devices are a major component of a wearable computer system, allowing the wearer to select and manipulate objects on the screen. The design of these pointing devices will have a major impact on the ease with which the operator can interact with information being displayed (Card, English, and Burr, 1978). As a result, this research is the first in a series to investigate design considerations for pointing devices and visual displays that will support wearable computer users. Twenty soldiers participated in an experiment using target acquisition software with five pointing devices and two visual displays. The findings of the research strongly support the use of a relative mode-pointing device with rotational characteristics (i.e. trackball or thumbwheel) over other designs. Furthermore, the results also suggest that there is little difference between pointing devices operated with the thumb and index finger for target acquisition tasks. This study has also showed that there were little differences in pointing and homing time for pointing devices across the two visual displays. Finally, the study demonstrated that the Fitts' law model could be applied to hand-operated pointing devices for wearable computers. This is important because it allows the future development of pointing devices to be compared with the devices tested in this research using the Fitts' Law Index of Performance calculations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Spencer, Ronald Allen

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Barfield, Woodrow S.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Nussbaum, Maury A.
• Kleiner, Brian M.

• Interaction Devices
• Wrist-word Display
• Input Devices
• Head-mounted Display
• Fitts Law

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-09292000-16510050

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/35223