Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Arnab Choudhury

Raman Kumar Sarin

Brian Ostergren

Rodger William Benson

Jordan Dale Andersen

Bo Rohlfsen

A cursor in a viewable portion of a webpage, or pan region, visually encounters a friction field when the cursor enters a margin of the viewable portion. As a user moves the cursor into the margin of the viewable portion, the movement of the displayed position of the cursor is limited as if the cursor is being restricted by a friction field in the margin. Also, as the cursor enters the margin of the viewable portion of the webpage, the webpage scrolls in the opposite direction of movement of the cursor. The amount of scroll of the webpage is proportional to a distance the cursor is away from an inner edge of the margin. When a user no longer attempts to move the cursor in the margin, the cursor fluidly drifts back toward a center of the viewable portion and so that scrolling of the webpage pauses.

Friction field for fluid margin panning in a webpage

Multi-stage cursor control techniques are described herein in which a control algorithm having multiple stages is applied to facilitate fine grained control over cursor movement and positioning. In one or more implementations, monitoring is performed to detect input provided via a controller for a computing device to manipulate a cursor within a user interface for an application. When input is detected, a multi-stage damping algorithm is applied to the detected input. The multi-stage damping algorithm may include both spatial and temporal dampening factors. Movement of the cursor is rendered in accordance with the damped input determined via application of the algorithm. Then, when input to manipulate the cursor is concluded, an attraction sequence is initiated to move the cursor to a target element contained in the user interface.

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Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Arnab Choudhury