Ken Hinkley received his PhD at the University of Virginia and is currently a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. The primary focus of his research is to enhance the input vocabulary that one can express using common computational devices and user interfaces. Koji Yatani is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. His primary research interest lies in HCI and ubiquitous computing, with an emphasis on hardware and sensing technologies. Michel Pahud holds a PhD in parallel computing from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and currently works at Microsoft Research in the area of user experience. More recently he has been working on innovative distributed collaboration experiences, smartphone exploration, and collaborating on pen and touch experiences with Ken Hinkley. Nicole Coddington holds a bachelors degree in visual communication from the University of Florida and spent several years working as a designer for Microsoft. She currently is employed as the senior interaction designer for HTC. Jenny Rodenhouse has a bachelors in Industrial Design from Syracuse University. She currently is an experience designer in the interactive environment division at Microsoft. Andy Wilson holds a BA from Cornell University, and a MS and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory. He currently works as a senior researcher for Microsoft, focusing on applying sensing techniques to enable new styles of HCI.
Hrvoji Benko is currently a researcher at Adaptive Systems and Interaction at Microsoft Research. He holds a PhD from Columbia University for work on augmented reality projects that combine immersive experiences with interactive tabletops. Bill Buxton holds a Bachelor of Music Degree from Queen's University, and it was his work on electronic instruments that led him to the field of HCI. He currently works as a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.
Summary:
Hypothesis
The researchers advocated a "division of labor" between the writing utensil and human touch when operating a digital writing system. Specifically, they hypothesized that a logical interface modeled after human behavior would make the pen exclusively responsible for writing, touch responsible for manipulation, and a combination of both should be used for the generation of new tools.
Methods
The researchers first performed an experiment to observe how people manipulate tools such as paper, pen, and a design surface when creating a craft. They told participants to put together a paper notebook consisting of clippings pasted into a notebook and observed how the participants used their hands, the pen, and the clippings in a collection of gestures and techniques for efficiency that we don't often think about. Later in the paper the authors describe how they applied their observations and integrated them into the system to be tried out by testers. The participants were asked to experiment with the resulting product and provide feedback about its usability.
Results
Users showed a positive reaction to the combined pen and touch interaction. Although it was noted that not all of the gestures and commands would be obvious without an explanation, they were reasonably intuitive and easy to remember and use. Also, although the system does not fully solve the problem of incidental touch, such as laying the hand on the page, it does mitigate the effects to some extent. In addition, participants noted that the concept of an object underlies many of the gestures, and that many of the gestures worked the same as they had when making the notebook.
Contents:
The paper goes into great detail about the interaction between a person's hand and pen when manipulating a design. It begins by describing some of the basic behaviors noted when users were creating the notebook, such as tucking the pen in their fingers and organizing their workspace around themselves. It then goes on to explore how these observations might be applied in the product, such as which hand is preferred for certain tasks and how the pen+touch system might support a either stationary or mobile usage. Some of the tools developed in the system were the stapler for grouping items into a stack, the x-acto knife for cutting or tearing items, the carbon copy, the ruler as a straightedge, and others. Touch was used in various manipulations such as navigating, zooming, and page arrangement.
Discussion:
I thought the paper was very effective in its description, approach, and execution of the problem. I was impressed with their tactic of observing how people interact naturally and then applying the observations to a design, and found the level of detail very satisfying. The paper is interesting because it is very easy to see how this system could be adopted almost seamlessly into daily life. However, I also feel that this isn't particularly novel and could be seen as reinventing the wheel. We have reasonably effective tablet PCs already, and the iPad has proven exceptionally popular in the past year or two. Truthfully, this niche in the market already has competition and there isn't much real need for an entirely new system no matter how well thought-out or cool it may be.
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