Paper Review - “Can We Beat the Mouse with MAGIC?”

The 2013 CHI paper by Ribel Fares et al. expands on the idea of faster mouse movement on desktops by combining physical movement with eye-tracking.

This concept is not new and in fact a similar implementations already exist, the latest of which: Conservative MAGIC.

Conservative MAGIC improves on previous methods by warping the mouse cursor only when signalled by a mouse movement by the user. Although this method improves on user-friendliness it is still not ideal because humans have a harder time following warping items rather than following their movement.

Mouse cursor warping was then replaced by dynamic speed movement; the mouse sensitivity is decreased when the distance between the cursor and gaze centre is small, and increased when large. This resulted in yet another issue: when the user went past the target the speed could quickly increase making the cursor shoot far away.

The proposed implementation in the paper is called Animated MAGIC. It is based on Conservative MAGIC but improves on both accuracy and speed by not only increasing the cursor speed during selection, but also homing it in towards the gaze centre. This method prevents missing of the target and gives a gradual speed change which is easy and comfortable to follow with your eyes.

Unfortunately eye-tracking accuracy is not very precise and can hinder the effectiveness of Animated MAGIC. To improve it the authors implemented a Dynamic Local Calibration method which uses selections as local calibration points.

The results showed that MAGIC methods perform much better than standard mouse movement and Dynamic Local Calibration improved both Conservative and Animation MAGIC. Furthermore, Animation MAGIC increased performance by 8% compared to standard mouse movement and was found to be more usable than all other methods.