Abstract
Warping the pointer across monitor bezels has previously been demonstrated to be both significantly faster and preferred to the standard mouse behavior when interacting across displays in homogeneous multi-monitor configurations. Complementing this work, we present a user study that compares the performance of four pointer-warping strategies, including a previously untested frame-memory placement strategy, in heterogeneous multi-monitor environments, where displays vary in size, resolution, and orientation. Our results show that a new frame-memory pointer warping strategy significantly improved targeting performance (up to 30% in some cases). In addition, our study showed that, when transitioning across screens, the mismatch between the visual and the device space has a significantly bigger impact on performance than the mismatch in orientation and visual size alone. For mouse operation in a highly heterogeneous multi-monitor environment, all our participants strongly preferred using pointer warping over the regular mouse behavior.
