Taking advantage of rolling gestures on a multidimensionnal mouse for interacting with a menubar.

This paper presents Rolling-Menu, an interaction technique based on the use of a multidimensional device, the Roly-Poly Mouse (RPM), to interact with a menu bar. Rolling-Menu reduces the distance covered with the pointer between the point of interaction in the application and the menu bar: this results in a better integration between the command selection and the direct manipulation of the content of an application. In addition, selecting an item from a menu bar with Rolling-Menu requires to roll RPM in a predefined direction. Therefore, such physical manipulations ensure that a similar access time is required to activate every menu item. An experiment evaluates different implementations of Rolling-Menu and compares them with a mouse. The results establish that the validation mode and the mapping between the roll direction and the items influence the performance of Rolling-Menu. It also shows that the best version of Rolling-Menu is between 14% and 40% faster than the mouse to select an item in a menubar containing 4 to 10 items. Finally, the error rate with Rolling-Menu (4%) is similar to that obtained with the mouse.