Combining Fitts’s Law with Angular Size

Authors' Affiliations

Jacob Gillenwater, Department of Computing, College of Business and Technology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN. Stephen Fields, Department of Computing, College of Business and Technology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN. Cheryl Cornett, Department of Digital Media, College of Business and Technology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN. Christopher Wallace, Department of Computing, College of Business and Technology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN.

Location

Ballroom

Start Date

4-12-2019 9:00 AM

End Date

4-12-2019 2:30 PM

Poster Number

33

Faculty Sponsor’s Department

Computing

Name of Project's Faculty Sponsor

Dr. Stephen Fields

Classification of First Author

Undergraduate Student

Type

Poster: Competitive

Project's Category

Human Computer Interaction, Virtual Reality, Computer Interface

Project's Category

Arts and Humanities

Abstract or Artist's Statement

Human-computer interaction is a growing field of computer science that combines psychological, biomechanical, and engineering design principles to help cater to a user's experience. Dr. Fitts created a mathematical model in 1954 which could accurately describe the difficulty of using a particular one-dimensional user interface, which was subsequently expanded to encompass two-dimensional user interfaces. Contemporary technological advances in virtual and augmented reality are currently leading towards widespread commercial use. This experiment attempts to adapt Fitts’s model once again to accommodate the three-dimensional user interfaces required of virtual and augmented reality. My hypothesis is that an object's angular size can be supplemented into Fitts’s model instead of its physical size. Participants were asked to wear a virtual reality headset and look at pairs of targets. Each pair has a different physical size, but the same angular size. The participants head movements are tracked using the virtual reality headset to determine how long it took each participant to find the center of a target. Linear regression is used to track the distance from the participants center of view to the center of a target over time. The slope of this regression lines is representative of the difficulty slope described by Fitts’s original model. The difficulty slopes are then plotted and compared to one another. Once using the targets’ physical size as the independent variable, and once using the target’s angular size as the independent variable. The coefficient of determination of the two data sets is then compared. If there exists a stronger relationship between the difficulty slope and the angular size of the target compared to the difficulty slope and the physical size of the target, then my hypothesis is true. Research is ongoing, but early preliminary test suggests that my hypothesis is correct. This means that an object's angular size can be supplemented into existing models instead of its physical size. This conclusion allows software developers and user interface designers to create more easily used and more optimized user interfaces.

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Apr 12th, 9:00 AM Apr 12th, 2:30 PM

Combining Fitts’s Law with Angular Size

Ballroom

Human-computer interaction is a growing field of computer science that combines psychological, biomechanical, and engineering design principles to help cater to a user's experience. Dr. Fitts created a mathematical model in 1954 which could accurately describe the difficulty of using a particular one-dimensional user interface, which was subsequently expanded to encompass two-dimensional user interfaces. Contemporary technological advances in virtual and augmented reality are currently leading towards widespread commercial use. This experiment attempts to adapt Fitts’s model once again to accommodate the three-dimensional user interfaces required of virtual and augmented reality. My hypothesis is that an object's angular size can be supplemented into Fitts’s model instead of its physical size. Participants were asked to wear a virtual reality headset and look at pairs of targets. Each pair has a different physical size, but the same angular size. The participants head movements are tracked using the virtual reality headset to determine how long it took each participant to find the center of a target. Linear regression is used to track the distance from the participants center of view to the center of a target over time. The slope of this regression lines is representative of the difficulty slope described by Fitts’s original model. The difficulty slopes are then plotted and compared to one another. Once using the targets’ physical size as the independent variable, and once using the target’s angular size as the independent variable. The coefficient of determination of the two data sets is then compared. If there exists a stronger relationship between the difficulty slope and the angular size of the target compared to the difficulty slope and the physical size of the target, then my hypothesis is true. Research is ongoing, but early preliminary test suggests that my hypothesis is correct. This means that an object's angular size can be supplemented into existing models instead of its physical size. This conclusion allows software developers and user interface designers to create more easily used and more optimized user interfaces.