A novel Fitts' law: Evaluating touch-based interfaces in atmospheric turbulence

Abstract

Aviation has experienced a huge leap in technology since the Wright Brothers first took flight in 1903. From the first propeller powered wood and canvas aircraft to the modern day aluminium and carbon fibre reinforced plastics jet aircraft [33], aviation has evolved. Next to the evolution of materials and aircraft going from propeller to high bypass ratio turbofan engines, the flight deck of aircraft has seen an incredible advance in technology. It has gone from countless gauges displaying all kinds of information to the pilots towards a digital flight deck, displaying information on screens. The latest step has been the introduction of touchscreens, allowing pilots to interact with the displayed information directly [2]. The novel use of touchbased interfaces allows for a lot of benefits like the direct interaction with information as mentioned, however, there are several drawbacks when using a touchbased interface. A main one is the difficulty of interaction with a touchbased interface when in a turbulent motion environment [6]. Research has been done before on the usability of touchbased interfaces when in an atmospheric turbulence environment, such as by Cockburn et al. in 2017 [6], but this work focuses on mitigating the effects of the atmospheric turbulence. On the other hand, research has been done on constructing a predictive model for the usability of a touchscreen, as performed by Bi et al. in [3], but this was in a stationary environment. In this research thesis a predictive model will be constructed that incorporates the effects of atmospheric turbulence into Fitts’ Law, [11], and Finger Fitts’ Law specifically, [3], in order to predict the usability of touchbased interfaces under various levels of atmospheric turbulence.