Pointer warping in heterogeneous multi-monitor environments

Abstract

Warping the pointer across monitor bezels has previously been demonstrated to be both significantly faster and preferred to the standard mouse behavior when interacting across displays in homogeneous multi-monitor configurations. Complementing this work, we present a user study that compares the performance of four pointer-warping strategies, including a previously untested frame-memory placement strategy, in heterogeneous multi-monitor environments, where displays vary in size, resolution, and orientation. Our results show that a new frame-memory pointer warping strategy significantly improved targeting performance (up to 30% in some cases). In addition, our study showed that, when transitioning across screens, the mismatch between the visual and the device space has a significantly bigger impact on performance than the mismatch in orientation and visual size alone. For mouse operation in a highly heterogeneous multi-monitor environment, all our participants strongly preferred using pointer warping over the regular mouse behavior.