Setting That Mouse for Tracking Tasks

A pointing device plays an important role in human-computer interaction. The computer mouse is a convenient device for both pointing and steering. The literature related to the effect of mouse gain on steering tasks is scarce. An experiment was conducted with 10 participants and each participant was asked to traverse a constrained path using a computer mouse. There were three levels of gain approximately equal to 2.3, 10, and 15. The experiment had 11 levels of difficulty (D/P) based on path width (P) and path length (D) and three trials for each combination of D and P. Performance was evaluated using movement time taken to traverse the path. The results showed that movement time is minimized, in feedback-controlled steering tasks, at a gain of around nine.