Radial Scroll and Curvature Drag Demo
Introduction
Below is a very quick, hacked together, demo of the curvature drag technique I developed while at Southampton University with the help of monica schraefel and Patrick Baudisch (which is probably how you got to this page). At the time of development we believed that it was unique and I suppose in a way it was. Unfortunately for us another, larger, group in the US had a very similar idea at about the same time and we both published at that years CHI conference (schraefel, m. c., Smith, G. and Baudisch, P. (2005) Curvature Dial: Eyes-free parameter entry for GUIs. In Proceedings of CHI 2005, Extended Abstracts (in press), Portland, Oregon, USA.). As they had significantly more resources (and I no longer worked at Southampton University) the porject sort of ground to a halt and as far as I know nothing more has been done on it.
How (Best) to Use It
It responds best to circles between two and seven centimeters in diameter at about one rovolution per second. At the moment, if you circle slowly the document will tend to just jitter up and down which is a result of not having much of an angle between the last two vectors. You can stop this to some extent by upping the minimum firing angle setting. Any value below the minimum will not cause an event to be fired. The maximum firing strength setting lets you decide at what point you want maximum response from the widget and hence fastest scroll. The maximum firing angle setting is used to trap extremely rapid changes in direction from causing strange scrolling behaviour. Finally the rate divisor is used to determine the size of the scroll step - larger values cause slower scrolling.