Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!iraq!halvers
From: halvers@iraq.steinmetz (Pete Halverson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Automatic mouse cursor movement
Message-ID: <11225@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 13 Jun 88 17:03:55 GMT
References: <10799@apple.Apple.Com> <10700006@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM> <5034@june.cs.washington.edu> <11088@steinmetz.ge.com> <4964@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com
Reply-To: iraq!halvers@steinmetz.UUCP (Pete Halverson)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 45

[Dave Riches (riches@uk.ac.essex) sent me the following, which I thought
was worth passing on to the Net ---PCH]

I work on a project called Adaptive Intelligent Dialogues which is
sponsored by Alvey in the United Kingdom.  During the course of ourt
research into adaptive mechanisms we played around with Adaptive Mice.
The idea was to see if we had enough information at the mouse level to 
provide adaption for the user.  If we could work out the user's intentions
when moving the mouse then we could 'second guess' the user and put the
mouse where it was wanted.

Firstly we had to see whether users liked having an adaptive mouse.  The
mouse adapted to the direction and speed of movement which the user
was applying to it.  We had various strategies such as speeding the mouse
up in any direction, or like a black hole effect drawing the mouse
in the direction of greatest movement etc.  This experiment was performed on
a Sun 2/120.  The main conclusion was that users did not like
non-deterministic mice.  The users preferred a mouse which moved faster
than the normal sun speed but they did not like the ones which predicted
where they were going and helped them in that direction.

There was one interesting strategy though.  This used prediction and
moved at 3 times the normal speed BUT decelerated to normal sun speed
at a distance of less than 2cm from its objective.  This strategy
was consistently 2nd out of the 8 strategies being beaten only by
a 2 times strategy.

Generally it was felt that because there is such a tight feedback loop
between the user's hand-eye movement then any interference to this
was detrimental to the user's performance.

As regards applications which move the mouse automatically, Smalltalk 80
and XSIS-Analyst do this.  I sometimes find this irritating especially
when it is not a consistent strategy across the application.  Otherwise
as you say, if the style of movement is consistent then it should be ok.

dave

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Pete Halverson                       ARPA: halverson@ge-crd.ARPA
GE Corporate R&D Center	             UUCP: uunet!steinmetz!iraq!halvers
Schenectady, NY				   halvers@iraq.steinmetz.UUCP
"You may be a vampire, but you're still my brother!" -- The Lost Boys