Paper Reading #3: Pen + Touch = New Tools

Pen + Touch = New Tools

By:
Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, Bill Buxton.

Presented at UIST 2010.

• Ken Hinckley has a PhD from University of Virginia and is currently a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.
• Koji Yatani is currently working on his PhD in HCI at the University of Toronto.
• Michel Pahud has a PhD in Parallel Computing from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and is currently working at Microsoft Research.
• Nicole Coddington has a Bachelors in Visual Communications from the University of Florida and currently works for HTC as a Senior Interaction Designer.
• Jenny Rodenhouse has a Bachelors in Industrial Distribution from Syracuse University and is currently working as an Experience Designer for Microsoft.
• Andy Wilson has a Bacherlor of Arts from Cornell University along with a Master of Science and a PhD From MIT. He is currently a senior researcher for Microsoft.
• Hrvoje Benko has a PhD from Colombia University and is currently employed at Microsoft as a Microsoft Research.
• Bill Buxton has a Bachelor of Music Degree from Queen's University and is currently a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.

Summary
Using typical human interaction with pen and paper as a model the authors have attempted to replicate and improve upon that concept. This new device uses a "pen" the write, the "touch" of a hand to move things around and the combination of both (pen+touch) allows the user a plethora of other options to manipulate their work with.

The Authors observed users make a physical arts project (scrap book) and catalogued the gestures, and then optimised the gestures so as to simplify the programming and improve upon the efficiency. Using this data they were able to create a functioning prototype that they could have other users test. The test users were asked to replicate a set of tasks previously done using paper with clippings, etc.

For the most part the users responded highly favourably. People found the use of the pen+hold features to be highly intuitive, and yet struggle to maintain functionality with gestures without explanation. The concept of Objects was the truly underlying concern when it came to the current prototype.

This paper is supposed to be more theoretical than practical. Their aim has been to do more research about how people typically use their hands to work and then try their best to replicate those behaviours. Behaviours specific to the dominant vs non-dominant hand, how the pen is handled when idle, etc have been the corner stone's of this project and thus the testing done was limited.

Discussion
Considering the absolute lack of effort put into the final prototype and how most of the work done was theoretical makes this quite fascinating. Considering the vast amount of data they've collected for this paper, a more thorough implementation of their idea with slightly more intuitive controls would be an exceedingly useful product. Reading the paper its easy to see that they have an extremely good grasp of what needs to be done, what the difficulties are, and roughly how to work around those problems.  Really it's now just a matter of sitting down and trying to work through all the implementation issues, because theoretically they've got a model that mimics human behaviour extremely well.