The Bubble Cursor

The bubble cursor is a target acquisition technique based on area cursors. The bubble cursor improves upon area cursors by dynamically resizing its activation area depending on the proximity of surrounding targets, such that only one target is selectable at any time. Empirical studies show that the bubble cursor significantly outperforms the point cursor, and that bubble cursor performance can be accurately modeled and predicted using Fitts' law.

Paper

Video

Demo Application

Source Code

chi2005bubblecursor.pdf (1.1mb)

bubblercursor.mov (27mb)

BubbleCursorDemo.exe*** (59k)

BubbleCursorSource.zip***  (74k)

***You have the right to use the code and executables posted at this web site that I have written in your own projects and upon doing so, you the programmer are solely responsible for determining it's worthiness for any given application or task. No support will be provided. I am not responsible for data loss, hardware damage, or disaster from your use of the code or executables. Please provide acknowledgement if you use any of the code. Unless otherwise stated or in the event that a snippet of code is written by another person, all code is copyright, Tovi Grossman.

 

Tovi Grossman and Ravin Balakrishnan. 2005. The bubble cursor: enhancing target acquisition by dynamic resizing of the cursor's activation area. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 281-290.

CHI 2005 Best Paper Award Winner

several