In this paper, a study was conducted to analyze the benefits of using both touch and pen interactions in the same application. They focused on the advantages and disadvantages of using the touch and pen in both the dominant hand and non-dominant hand in different applications, trying to combine the positive qualities of each input method and avoid the negative qualities. They were able to deduce the best setup from previous studies. They then created a paint application to test this setup with the different bimanual tasks.
This is a photo of one part of the application. The non-dominant hand uses touch to select color or tools, and the dominant hand uses the pen to draw (due to its increased precision). Many tools were created for this interaction setup for this application, such as bringing up menus, toggling between free-form drawing and straight line drawing, undoing drawing segments, selecting specific colors, and copying and pasting.
They also conducted an interesting experiment with a maze and three different combinations of inputs to finish the maze.
In the end it was found that the pen and touch combination of inputs exceeds the other types (pen and pen, touch and touch) in terms of speed, accuracy, and user preference, making it superior for these applications.
Mike Litchfield
3 comments
marktaipan says:
July 15, 2009 at 1:36 pm (UTC -4)
This is a definitely interesting project. One potential problem (and I guess is more of an application design issue) would be to allow to rest the arm, wrist and non-dominant hand on the table without it being detected as touch. I also wonder if speed really matters to an artist if they’re used to drawing on tablets. Otherwise, it’s really neat!
Mark Taipan
mlitch21 says:
July 15, 2009 at 1:42 pm (UTC -4)
Yes, resting an arm on the screen would cause a problem for many multitouch applications, not only this one. Also the speed mentioned in the conclusion pertains more to the maze part of the experiment, not the drawing application. This maze task is explained in the paper.
Andrew Kun says:
July 15, 2009 at 4:43 pm (UTC -4)
Speed also matters very much when selecting from the multitude of tools, options, etc., provided by commercial photo editing/drawing/other art programs. E.g. if you have to save a file many times a day, clicking on the File menu and then on Save is a lot slower than hitting Ctrl-S, and over hours, days and weeks, this time difference adds up.