Efficacité et robustesse aux distracteurs d'un retour tactile pour faciliter le pointage

Surfpad is a pointing facilitation technique that operates in the tactile domain by taking advantage of the ability to alter a touchpad's coefficient of friction. We report on two experiments comparing it to the semantic pointing technique and constant control-display gain with and without distractor targets. Our results clearly show the limits of traditional target-aware gain adaptation in the latter case, and the benefits of our tactile approach in both cases. Surfpad can lead to a performance improvement of up to 21% compared to unassisted pointing at small targets with no distractor. It is also robust to high distractor densities, keeping an average performance improvement of nearly 10% while semantic pointing can degrade up to 100%.