In the era of the vast spread of touch screens through the smartphones and tablets, there are quite a few who are beginning to realize the value of using it pen/ styluses, as they often allow greater accuracy and ease of use.
This is the direction of Bill Buxton and Ken Hickley, who brought together a team of researchers from Microsoft Research (MSR), Cornell University and the University of Manitoba to explore the flexibility / dexterity of the human hand to explore. new frontiers ”in human-computer interaction. Their research focused on the tablet and the pen and was radical enough to win the Best Paper Award at UIST 2014 (User Interface Software and Technology Symposium) in Hawaii.
"There is a reason that Picasso used a brush instead of painting fingers, as there is a reason why a dentist uses precision wheels, which are basically just a specialized pen, as opposed to chisel," Buxton notes. "Fingers and hands have this incredible skill, both on their own, like when you pinch and zoom in on a touchscreen, but also with hand-held tools. So when we think about a pen, it's just another long, delicate tool with which we can do amazing things. "
The two researchers believe that they are the small details in the hand movement, such as when holding a pen on the fingers, which have the "key" to create a reckoning pen of the possibilities of the hands that hold it. In their research they developed a tablet and a pen that each have inertia sensors in order to study these details. In cooperation, they allow for a wide range of movements, as well as the location and relative orientation of each device. In addition, the pen is covered by a multitouch grip sensor that "reads" the handle of the user and also allows you to start or stop a job with a simple touch of the finger. The tablet also features full grip sensing, providing additional information about the user's intentions.
The end result was the creation of a tool that, according to the announcement, "extends the interaction between the two hands in the digital work environment. It will be exciting to see what new scenarios will be opened in the future for this research. "
Source: naftemporiki.gr
