A Comparative Evaluation of Pointing and Crossing in Moving Target Selection
Xiaoyu Zhang, Minh Hoang Nguyen, Jin Huang, Huawei Tu · Human Factors The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society · 2025
Objective This work presents a comprehensive analysis of fundamental performance of crossing-based moving target selection. Background Although the crossing interaction with static targets has been theoretically studied, there has yet to be a generalizable, controlled empirical study investigating the fundamental performance of crossing-based selection for moving targets. Method We conducted an experiment with stylus input to investigate how users acquire moving targets with crossing compared to pointing as a baseline. Results The most noteworthy finding of our study is that crossing had overall greater advantages over pointing for moving target selection (a 12.37% reduction in task completion time and a 5.88% increase in accuracy rate for orthogonal crossing , and a comparable task time and a 4.71% increase in accuracy rate for collinear crossing ). However, the advantages of crossing would be insignificant when targets become larger than approximately 14.69 mm or move slower than 14.69 mm/s. Conclusion Crossing performance varied between collinear crossing and orthogonal crossing . T = a + b l o g 2 ( A + V k ) − c l o g 2 ( W 2 − V k ) in (Hoffmann, 1991) can be used to model time performance of crossing-based moving target selection. Application Such results provide a theoretical foundation for crossing-based interface design with moving objects.