Electronic whiteboards remain surprisingly difficult to use in the context of creativity support and design.
A key problem is that once a designer places strokes and reference images on a canvas, actually doing anything useful with key parts of that content involves numerous steps.
Hence, with digital ink, scope—that is, selection of content—is a central concern, yet current approaches often require encircling ink with a lengthy lasso, if not switching modes via round-trips to the far-off edges of the display.
Only then can the user take action, such as to copy, refine, or re-interpret their informal work-in-progress.
Such is the stilted nature of selection and action in the digital world.
But it need not be so.
By contrast, consider an everyday manual task such as sandpapering a piece of woodwork to hew off its rough edges. Here, we use our hands to grasp and bring to the fore—that is, select—the portion of the work-object—the wood—that we want to refine.
And because we are working with a tool—the sandpaper—the hand employed for this ‘selection’ sub-task is typically the non-preferred one, which skillfully manipulates the frame-of-reference for the subsequent ‘action’ of sanding, a complementary sub-task articulated by the preferred hand.
Therefore, in contrast to the disjoint subtasks foisted on us by most interactions with computers, the above example shows how complementary manual activities lend a sense of flow that “chunks” selection and action into a continuous selection-action phrase. By manipulating the workspace, the off-hand shifts the context of the actions to be applied, while the preferred hand brings different tools to bear—such as sandpaper, file, or chisel—as necessary.
The main goal of the WritLarge project, then, is to demonstrate similar continuity of action for electronic whiteboards. This motivated free-flowing, close-at-hand techniques to afford unification of selection and action via bimanual pen+touch interaction.
Accordingly, we designed WritLarge so that user can simply gesture as follows:
With the thumb and forefinger of the non-preferred hand, just frame a portion of the canvas.
And, unlike many other approaches to “handwriting recognition,” this approach to selecting key portions of an electronic whiteboard leaves the user in complete control of what gets recognized—as well as when recognition occurs—so as not to break the flow of creative work.
Indeed, building on this foundation, we designed ways to shift between flexible representations of freeform content by simply moving the pen along semantic, structural, and temporal axes of movement.
See our demo reel below for some jaw-dropping demonstrations of the possibilities for digital ink opened up by this approach.
Haijun Xia, Ken Hinckley, Michel Pahud, Xioa Tu, and Bill Buxton. 2017. WritLarge: Ink Unleashed by Unified Scope, Action, and Zoom. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 3227-3240. Denver, Colorado, United States, May 6-11, 2017. Honorable Mention Award (top 5% of papers). https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025664
This work sheds light on gaps and discrepancies between the experiences afforded by analog pens and their digital counterparts.
Despite the long history (and recent renaissance) of digital pens, the literature still lacks a comprehensive survey of what types of marks people make and what motivates them to use ink—both analog and digital—in daily life.
To capture the diversity of inking behaviors and tease out the unique affordances of pen-and ink, we conducted a diary study with 26 participants from diverse backgrounds.
From analysis of 493 diary entries we identified 8 analog pen-and-ink activities, and 9 affordances of pens. We contextualized and contrasted these findings using a survey with 1,633 respondents and a follow-up diary study with 30 participants, observing digital pens.
Our analysis revealed many gaps and research opportunities based on pen affordances not yet fully explored in the literature.
Yann Riche, Nathalie Henry Rich, Ken Hinckley, Sarah Fuelling, Sarah Williams, and Sheri Panabaker. 2017. As We May Ink? Learning from Everyday Analog Pen Use to Improve Digital Ink Experiences. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 3241-3253. Denver, Colorado, United States, May 6-11, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025716
It’s been a busy year, so I’ve been more than a little remiss in posting my Best Paper Award recipient from last year’s User Interface Software & Technology (UIST) symposium.
UIST is a great venue, particularly renowned for publishing cutting-edge innovations in devices, sensors, and hardware.
And software that makes clever uses thereof.
Title slide from my talk on this project. We had a lot of help, fortunately. The picture illustrates a typical scenario in pen & tablet interaction — where the user interacts with touch, but the pen is still at the ready, in this case palmed in the user’s fist.
The paper takes two long-standing research themes for me — pen (plus touch) interaction, and interesting new ways to use sensors — and smashes them together to produce the ultimate Frankenstein child of tablet computing:
Microsoft Research’s sensor pen. It’s covered in groovy orange shrink-wrap, too. What could be better than that? (The shrink wrap proved necessary to protect some delicate connections between our grip sensor and the embedded circuitry).
And if you were to unpack this orange-gauntleted beast, here’s what you’d find:
Components of the sensor pen, including inertial sensors, a AAAA battery, a Wacom mini pen, and a flexible capacitive substrate that wraps around the barrel of the pen.
But although the end-goal of the project is to explore the new possibilities afforded by sensor technology, in many ways, this paper kneads a well-worn old worry bead for me.
It’s all about the hand.
With little risk of exaggeration you could say that I’ve spent decades studying nothing but the hand. And how the hand is the window to your mind… [Spark radio interview with Ken Hinckley]
Or shall I say hands. How people coordinate their action. How people manipulate objects. How people hold things. How we engage with the world through the haptic sense, how we learn to articulate astoundingly skilled motions through our fingers without even being consciously aware that we’re doing anything at all.
I’ve constantly been staring at hands for over 20 years.
And yet I’m still constantly surprised.
People exhibit all sorts of manual behaviors, tics, and mannerisms, hiding in plain sight, that seemingly inhabit a strange shadow-world — the realm of the seen but unnoticed — because these behaviors are completely obvious yet somehow they still lurk just beneath conscious perception.
Nobody even notices them until some acute observer takes the trouble to point them out.
For example:
Take a behavior as simple as holding a pen in your hand.
You hold the pen to write, of course, but most people also tuck the pen between their fingers to momentarily stow it for later use. Other people do this in a different way, and instead palm the pen, in more of a power grip reminiscent of how you would grab a suitcase handle. Some people even interleave the two behaviors, based on what they are currently doing and whether or not they expect to use the pen again soon:
Illustration of tuck grip (left) vs. palm grip (right) methods of stowing the pen when it is temporarily not in use.
This seems very simple and obvious, at least in retrospect. But such behaviors have gone almost completely unnoticed in the literature, much less actively sensed by the tablets and pens that we use — or even leveraged to produce more natural user interfaces that can adapt to exactly how the user is currently handing and using their devices.
If we look deeper into these writing and tucking behaviors alone, a whole set of grips and postures of the hand emerge:
A simple design space of common pen grips and poses (postures of the hand) in pen and touch computing with tablets.
Looking even more deeply, once we have tablets that support a pen as well as full multi-touch, users naturally want to used their bare fingers on the screen in combination with the pen, so we see another range of manual behaviors that we call extension grips based on placing one (or more) fingers on the screen while holding the pen:
Much richness in “extension” grips, where touch is used while the pen is still being held, can also be observed. Here we see various single-finger extension grips for the tuck vs. the palm style of stowing the pen.
People also exhibited more ways of using multiple fingers on the touchscreen that I expected:
Likewise, people extend multiple fingers while holding the pen to pinch or otherwise interact with the touchscreen.
So, it began to dawn on us that there was all this untapped richness in terms of how people hold, manipulate, write on, and extend fingers when using pen and touch on tablets.
And that sensing this could enable some very interesting new possibilities for the user interfaces for stylus + tablet computing:
On our pen, for example, we can sense subtle motions — using full 3D inertial sensors including accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer — as well as sense how the user grips the pen — this time using a flexible capacitive substrate wrapped around the entire barrel of the pen.
These capabilities then give rise to sensor signals such as the following:
Sensor signals for the pen’s capacitive grip sensor with the writing grip (left) vs. the tuck grip (middle). Exemplar motion signals are shown on the right.
This makes various pen grips and motions stand out quite distinctly, states that we can identify using some simple gesture recognition techniques.
Armed with these capabilities, we explored presenting a number of context-appropriate tools.
As the very simplest example, we can detect when you’re holding the pen in a grip (and posture) that indicates that you’re about to write. Why does this matter? Well, if the touchscreen responds when you plant your meaty palm on it, it causes no end of mischief in a touch-driven user interface. You’ll hit things by accident. Fire off gestures by mistake. Leave little “ink turds” (as we affectionately call them) on the screen if the application responds to touch by leaving an ink trace. But once we can sense it’s your palm, we can go a long ways towards solving these problems with pen-and-touch interaction.
To pull the next little rabbit out of my hat, if you tap the screen with the pen in hand, the pen tools (what else?) pop up:
Tools specific to the pen appear when the user taps on the screen with the pen stowed in hand.
But we can take this even further, such as to distinguish bare-handed touches — to support the standard panning and zooming behaviors — versus a pinch articulated with the pen-in-hand, which in this example brings up a magnifying glass particularly suited to detail work using the pen:
A pinch multi-touch gesture with the left hand pans and zooms. But a pinch articulated with the pen-in-hand brings up a magnifier tool for doing fine editing work.
Another really fun way to use the sensors — since we can sense the 3D orientation of the pen even when it is away from the screen — is to turn it into a digital airbrush:
Airbrushing with a pen. Note that the conic section of the resulting “spray” depends on the 3D orientation of the pen — just as it would with a real airbrush.
At any rate, it was a really fun project that garnered a best paper award, and a fair bit of press coverage (Gizmodo, Engadget, & named FastCo Design’s #2 User Interface innovation of 2014 (paywalled), among other coverage). It’s pretty hard to top that.
Unless maybe we do a lot more with all kinds of cool sensors on the tablet as well.
Hmmm…
You might just want to stay tuned here. There’s all kinds of great stuff in the works, as always (grin).
Hinckley, K., Pahud, M., Benko, H., Irani, P., Guimbretiere, F., Gavriliu, M., Chen, X., Matulic, F., Buxton, B., Wilson, A., Sensing Techniques for Tablet+Stylus Interaction. In the 27th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’14). Honolulu, Hawaii, Oct 5-8, 2014, pp. 605-614. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2642918.2647379
The organizers of WIPTTE 2015, the Workshop on the Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education, kindly invited me to speak about my recent work on sensing techniques for stylus + tablet interaction.
One of the key points that I emphasized:
To design technology to fully take advantage of human skills, it is critical to observe what people do with their hands when they are engaged in manual activites such as handwriting.
Notice my deliberate the use of the plural, hands, as in both of ’em, in a division of labor that is a perfect example of cooperative bimanual action.
My six-year-old daughter demonstrates the power of crayon and touch technology.
And of course I had my usual array of stupid sensor tricks to illustrate the many ways that sensing systems of the future embedded in tablets and pens could take advantage of such observations. Some of these possible uses for sensors probably seem fanciful, in this antiquated era of circa 2015.
But in eerily similar fashion, some of the earliest work that I did on sensors embedded in handheld devices also felt completely out-of-step with the times when I published it back in the year 2000. A time so backwards it already belongs to the last millennium for goodness sakes!
Now aspects of that work are embedded in practically every mobile device on the planet.
It was a fun talk, with an engaged audience of educators who are eager to see pen and tablet technology advance to better serve the educational needs of students all over the world. I have three kids of school age now so this stuff matters to me. And I love speaking to this audience because they always get so excited to see the pen and touch interaction concepts I have explored over the years, as well as the new technologies emerging from the dim fog that surrounds the leading frontiers of research.
I am a strong believer in the dictum that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
And the pen may be the single greatest tool ever invented to harness the immense creative power of the human mind, and thereby to scrawl out–perhaps even in the just-in-time fashion of the famous book Harold and the Purple Crayon–the uncertain path that leads us forward.
If you are an educator seeing impacts of pen, tablet, and touch technology in the classroom, then I strongly encourage you to start organizing and writing up your observations for next year’s workshop. The 2016 edition of the series, (now renamed CPTTE) will be held at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and chaired by none other than the esteemed Andries Van Dam, who is my academic grandfather (i.e. my Ph.D. advisor’s mentor) and of course widely respected in computing circles throughout the world.
Ken Hinckley. WIPTTE 2015 Invited Talk: Sensing Techniques for Tablet + Stylus Interaction. Workshop on the Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education, Redmond, WA, April 28th, 2015. [Slides (PowerPoint)] [Slides PDF]
My alter-ego has a guest blog up on the Penumbra magazine site today that talks about how to succeed at creative endeavors. You know, writing and artwork, music and sculpture. All the good stuff.
And yes, scientific research is very much a creative endeavor as well.
In this short essay I also recount a story that Gary Starkweather, the inventor of the laser printer, used to tell about how he evaluated start-up companies, and I promise you will laugh when you hear how he did it.
I used to frequent the hardware lab where Gary worked before he retired so I consider myself very lucky to have spent a lot of time talking shop with him and enjoying his jokes. And this one is one of my favorite of his stories that he would tell about working in Silicon Valley. Great fun.
PS: Gary was also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay in the New Yorker about The Creation Myth. Seek it out – it’s a great read on the truth about innovation!
Haijun Xia, Ken Hinckley, Michel Pahud, Xioa Tu, and Bill Buxton. 2017. WritLarge: Ink Unleashed by Unified Scope, Action, and Zoom. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 3227-3240. Denver, Colorado, United States, May 6-11, 2017. Honorable Mention Award (top 5% of papers).
Yann Riche, Nathalie Henry Rich, Ken Hinckley, Sarah Fuelling, Sarah Williams, and Sheri Panabaker. 2017. As We May Ink? Learning from Everyday Analog Pen Use to Improve Digital Ink Experiences. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 3241-3253. Denver, Colorado, United States, May 6-11, 2017.
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The Past and Present Future 