ARC-Pad: a mobile device for efficient cursor control on large displays

Abstract

I present ARC-Pad, a cursor positioning technique for large displays. It allows us to use a touchscreen-enabled phone as a mobile touchpad, and has a hybrid pointing technique to quickly reach distant targets. Users can tap to instantly transport the cursor to a location onscreen, then slide for fine positioning, as with a regular touchpad. This combination makes ARC-Pad especially suited to large displays, even when the touchpad is very small.

I develop several modifications to ARC-Pad and evaluate them, including sending screenshots of the desktop to the phone's touchscreen and using accelerometer data to dynamically modify control-display gain. I perform a series of experiments to compare ARC-Pad to existing cursor positioning systems, and show that ARC-Pad achieves a higher throughput in a target selection task.

Finally, I extend ARC-Pad for 3D object positioning, and show that ARC-Pad comes very close to the performance of a 6DOF input device.