A Fitts' Law Evaluation of Video Game Controllers
Adrian Ramcharitar, Robert J. Teather · 2017
We present a pilot study evaluating three different game input methods offered by the Steam Controller: a thumb-based touchpad, thumbstick, and gyrosensor. In a Fitts' law pointing experiment, we compared these three input methods to the mouse, a commonly used baseline condition. The mouse had the best throughput at 4.73 bps, followed by the touchpad at 2.98 bps, then the gyrosensor at 2.85 bps, and finally the thumbstick at 2.39 bps. This indicates that the touchpad and gyrosensor are good alternatives to the traditional thumbstick, despite prevalence of the thumbstick on modern game controllers.