Ghost-hunting: a cursor-based pointing technique with picture guide indication of the shortest path

Abstract

Ghost-Hunting (GH) is a new technique that improves pointing performance in a graphical user interface (GUI) by expanding targets to facilitate easier access. In GH, the effect of decreasing the movement distance of a cursor by expanding the size of onscreen targets is utilized to improve the GUI. GH shows the guides of the end point of the shortest movement path, called ghosts, inside expanded target areas. Users can optimize their cursor movements by only moving their cursor towards the ghosts in GH, unlike other techniques that use the invisible outline of an expanded target such as with Bubble Cursor. We conduct an experimental evaluation to clarify the effectiveness of GH in menu-item selection tasks. The result shows that GH's selection time was significantly faster than that of the ordinal cursor or Bubble Cursor. In particular, GH is faster than Bubble Cursor in environments with a high density of targets.