Do We Need a Faster Mouse? Empirical Evaluation of Asynchronicity-Induced Jitter

Do We Need a Faster Mouse? Empirical Evaluation of Asynchronicity-Induced Jitter
Auejin Ham, Junsu Lim, Sunjun Kim

UIST'21: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Session: Typing and Pointing

Abstract
In gaming, accurately rendering input signals on a display is crucial, both spatially and temporally. However, the asynchronicity between the input and output signal frequencies results in unstable responses called "jitter." A recent research modeled this jitter mathematically; however, the effect of jitter on human performance is unknown. In this study, we investigated the empirical effect of asynchronicity-induced jitter using a state-of-the-art high-performance mouse and monitor device. In the first part, perceptual user experience under different jitter levels was examined using the ISO 4120:2004 triangle test protocol, and a jitter of over 0.3 ms could be perceived by sensitive subjects. In the second part, we measured the pointing task performance for different jitter levels using the ISO 9241-9 (i.e., Fitts' law) test, and found that the pointing performance was unaffected up to a jitter of 1 ms. Finally, we recommended display and mouse combinations based on our results, which indicated the need for a higher mouse polling rate than that of the current standard 1000-Hz USB mouse.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474783
WEB:: https://uist.acm.org/uist2021/

Talk Recording of the UIST 2021 Papers Program