Multidirectional Pointing Input Using a Hardware Keyboard

Abstract

Herein, we propose a novel method to create multidirectional and multilevel pointing input using only a hardware keyboard. The relative position vectors among pressed keys are calculated into an input vector: The pointing performance of this method is evaluated based on the ISO 9241-9 recommendations. We find that the performance of the method is sufficient to create moderate pointing input, as the measurement of the throughput is close to that of a touchpad, as measured in past studies also using the ISO 9241-9 recommendations