Mouse Sensitivity Effects in First-Person Targeting Tasks

TL;DR

This study identifies optimal mouse sensitivity ranges for first-person targeting tasks, revealing significant effects on performance and highlighting a speed-precision trade-off influenced by task difficulty, which informs better sensitivity settings.

Contribution

First user study to empirically determine optimal mouse sensitivity ranges for first-person targeting, bridging pointer-based gain literature with first-person camera controls.

Findings

Optimal sensitivity range significantly improves task performance.

Speed-precision trade-off varies with task difficulty.

Incompatibility of sensitivity metrics between pointer-based and first-person tasks.

Abstract

Despite billions of hours of play and copious discussion online, mouse sensitivity recommendations for first-person targeting tasks vary by a factor of 10x or more and remain an active topic of debate in both competitive and recreational gaming communities. Inspired by previous academic literature in pointer-based gain optimization, we conduct the first user study of mouse sensitivity in first person targeting tasks, reporting a statistically significant range of optimal values in both task completion time and throughput. Due to inherent incompatibility (i.e., lack of convert-ability) between sensitivity metrics adopted for prior pointer-based gain literature and those describing first-person targeting, we provide the first analytically demonstrated, statistically significant optimal sensitivity range useful for first-person camera controls. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this optimal sensitivity range arises (at least in part) from a speed-precision trade-off impacted by spatial task difficulty, similar to results reported in pointer-based sensitivity literature previously.