Bubble Lens

Download

Current Version 1.0.0

Windows executable: BubbleLensExe.zip
Source code: BubbleLens.zip
Pseudocode: Pseudocode (PDF)

The Bubble Lens requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework or later. Download it here.
This software is distributed under the New BSD License agreement.

About

The Bubble Lens is a pointing facilitation technique that builds upon the Bubble Cursor by remedying the Bubble Cursor's poor performance around small, dense targets. Specifically, the Bubble Lens detects when the user is approaching a small, densely packed target and, as the user attempts to acquire this target, the cursor automatically magnifies into a circular lens, speeding the user's final stage of target acquisition. The automatic magnification is based on a technique called kinematic triggering that continually monitors a movement's velocity profile for the presence of certain events or conditions. In the case of the Bubble Lens, kinematic triggering fires the lens on the downslope of the first corrective movement in the velocity profile. In laboratory studies of random target-field pointing, the Bubble Lens was 10.2% faster and 37.9% more accurate than the Bubble Cursor.

Video

The Bubble Lens on YouTube.

Publication

Mott, M.E. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2014). Beating the bubble: Using kinematic triggering in the Bubble Lens for acquiring small, dense targets. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). Toronto, Ontario (April 26-May 1, 2014). New York: ACM Press, pp. 733-742.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-0952786. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any supporter listed above.