BezelCursor: Bezel-Initiated Cursor for One-Handed Target Acquisition on Mobile Touch Screens

We present BezelCursor, a novel one-handed thumb interaction technique for target acquisition on mobile touch screens of various sizes. Our technique combines bezel-initiated interaction and gestural pointing to solve the problem of limited screen accessibility afforded by the thumb. With a fixed, comfortable grip of a mobile touch device, a user may employ our tool to easily and quickly access a target located anywhere on the screen, using a single fluid action. Unlike the existing technologies, our technique requires no explicit mode switching to invoke and can be smoothly used together with commonly adopted interaction styles such as direct touch and dragging. A user study shows that the performance of our technique is comparable to or even better than that of the state-of-the-art techniques, which, however, suffer from various problems such as explicit mode switching, finger occlusion and/or limited accessibility.

Li Wing Ho Andy
City University of Hong Kong