Paper Reading #3: Pen + touch = new tools

Reference Information
Pen + Touch = New Tools. Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington,

Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, and Bill Buxton. Published in the UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.
Author Bios

The researchers are all from Microsoft research, and Koji Yatani is also part of the University of Toronto.

Summary
Hypothesis

Their hypothesis was that using pen and touch would be a better interface than current computer interfaces.

Methods

The first study was asking people to make a storyboard by pasting and annotating clippings in a notebook. In order to see how people manipulated objects with touch. They used 8 people and taped them.

Next they moved onto their technology of using a Microsoft Surface with an infrared LED pen, but did not directly test it.

Results

From the storyboard study, they had observed 9 behaviors. These include: having specific roles for the use of the pen and fingers, tucked the pen in-between fingers, held clippings in the non-dominant hand, the held a clipping with their non-dominant hand while writing on it, would frame clippings, sometimes incorporating scraps, had an extended workspace, piled interesting things, some would draw along edges, and held the page while flipping.

                                                     Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington,

                                                     Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, and Bill Buxton.

                                                     Pen + Touch = New Tools.
Contents

The majority of the paper talked about the technology of the Pen and Touch. They implemented a large number of things for using the tools, such as cutting items or grouping items, based on the results of their initial study. Overall their approach was that one writes with the pen, and one manipulates with touch, and the combination can yield new tools.

Discussion

This paper is interesting as it discusses new techniques that might be useful for creating more natural interfaces to computers. The main fault in this paper is that they have not thoroughly tested the new techniques yet. So the next thing they might do, would be to test the technology itself, since all they have tested thus far is how people interacted with real objects.