Performance measures of game controllers in a three-dimensional environment

Little work exists on the testing and evaluation of computer-game related input devices. This paper presents five new performance metrics and utilizes two tasks from the literature to quantify differences between input devices in constrained three-dimensional environments, similar to "first-person"-genre games. The metrics are Mean Speed Variance, Mean Acceleration Variance, Percent View Moving, Target Leading Analysis, and Mean Time-to-Reacquire. All measures are continuous, as they evaluate movement during a trial. The tasks involved tracking a moving target for several seconds, with and without target acceleration. An evaluation between an X-Box gamepad and a standard PC mouse demonstrated the ability of the metrics to help reveal and explain performance differences between the devices.