In many appli­cations – such as in air-traffic con­trol, in video sur­veill­ance, and in com­puter games – the user needs to quick­ly and accu­ra­te­ly select ob­jects that are mov­ing across the screen. Several pre­vious re­search pro­jects have pro­posed vari­ous tech­ni­ques that can assist the user when click­ing on mov­ing screen objects. The aim with this pro­ject is to com­pare such tech­niques and to build a theo­re­ti­cal model that mathe­ma­ti­cally de­scri­bes and pre­dicts how fast users can se­lect tar­gets that are mov­ing across the screen (de­pend­ing on the size of the tar­get and its moving speed).

A first version of a Java appli­ca­tion that pro­vi­des the necess­ary func­ti­on­ality to con­duct user ex­peri­ments on selec­tion of moving screen objects has al­ready been de­vel­oped. In this pro­ject you will first ex­tend this app­li­ca­tion with addi­tional func­tion­ality and then de­sign and con­duct a user ex­peri­ment that allows you to 1) veri­fy pre­vi­ously re­ported re­search re­sults on the effect­ive­ness of var­ious tech­niques that support the selec­tion of mov­ing screen ob­jects, and 2) empi­ri­cally build and veri­fy a pre­dictive per­for­mance model that ex­plains how fast users can select mov­ing screen objects.

Accordingly, with this pro­ject you have the oppor­tu­nity to deepen your pro­gramming skills (using Swing, Java’s GUI tool­kit) and you will gain ex­peri­ence in how to de­sign, conduct, and eva­luate user ex­peri­ments, and in theo­re­ti­cal modell­ing of user per­for­mance.

Technologies & Tools: Java, SPSS (for statistical analysis)

Contact: Dr. David Ahlström