Conté: Multimodal Input Inspired by an Artist’s Crayon
UIST 2011, October 2011, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Daniel Vogel
· LIFL & INRIA Lille, University of France
Géry Casiez
· Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada
Summary
The idea behind a Conté crayon is to have corners,
edges, ends and sides; all of which can be written with. The use for one in this paper is to help the
user elegantly switch between multiple modes.
Other possible forms are being explored but they do not have Conté’s
simplicity.
Exploratory interviews were conducted with real artists to
understand the “real Conté and its potential digital counterpart.” The participants used three mock-ups, a
tablet pen and a short pen. The rectangular
prism was the favorite. As a side note:
the participants gave several observations to the researchers and enjoyed the
task.
The chosen “form
potentially supports 26 different contacts, classified into 7 types: 8 corners,
4 short end edges, 4 medium end edges, 4 long side edges, 2 end faces, 2 thick
side faces, and 2 thin side faces.” It
is the grip associated with a contact point that helps facilitate the switch
between modes. One question consistently
asked is can a person remember the 26 different options and their contact
points? A potential way to solve this is
to label the faces for novices and have “tactile patterns for eye-free
manipulation.”
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| Figure 1. |
The descriptions of which side, edge, and corner do what is explained in this paper. There are many pieces of information which need to be verified before this is a proven concept and more which need to be included.
Related Work
1.
“Enabling interaction with single user
applications through speech and gestures on a multi-user tabletop” – The idea
presented here is similar to the idea of a Conté crayon except through gestures
and speech.
2.
“Flux: a tilting multi-touch and pen based
surface” – The principles of this paper (Conté) would be helpful when working
with the Flux surface because the surface needs to be able to interpret the
input from the user for writing, switching, and more.
3.
“SideSight: multi-"touch" interaction
around small devices” – This device is similar to the one described in Conté in
that it uses IR sensors, but SideSight is designed for small devices and uses
hand signals instead of a writing device.
It is also different because the software will be used for application,
not switching between items.
4.
“C-Slate: A Multi-Touch and Object Recognition System for Remote
Collaboration using Horizontal Surfaces” – C-Slate is similar to the software
which is associated with Conté except that it requires the use of hands to
change the display.
5.
“Touch & Write: Penabled Collaborative Intelligence”
– The Touch & Write tablet has the capabilities of reading from two pens,
but cannot switch between modes easily.
6.
“Understanding Pen and Touch Interaction for
Data Exploration on Interactive Whiteboards” – This study is similar to Conté’s
because it involves determining possible ways of reading a switch between modes
in use. It is different because it is a
theoretical study and not a software test.
7.
“Understanding Multi-touch Manipulation for Surface
Computing “ – This paper focuses on the users interaction with a
screen when using two hands, not a pen; but still rather similar.
8.
“ThinSight: versatile multi-touch sensing for
thin form-factor displays” – ThinSight is similar to Conté in that it is a form
of changing things on the screen; it is different in that it works with fingers
and not a pen.
9.
“Single user multitouch on the DiamondTouch:
from 2 x 1D to 2D” – DiamondTouch is focused on user identification and touch
detection. This makes it fundamentally
different from Conté but similar enough that it has some of the same basic
ideas.
10.
“Large interactive surfaces based on
digital pens” – This design is fundamentally similar to Conté in that it uses
pens to track use, but drastically different because it focuses on the large
screens and not personal ones.
From what I
have read, the idea of taking a pen and making it the form of transition from
one type of input to another seems fairly novel. There are other people working on the same
principle, but they are not using pens as the means of transition.
Evaluation
This paper used a qualitative, subjective measuring system
when they were determining which design of the digital Conté
crayon was to be used for further testing.
The best example of this is the exploratory interviews that were
conducted before the creation of a digital Conté crayon occurred. On the other hand testing the effectiveness
of the digital Conté crayon’s software used quantitative, objective and quantitative,
subjective forms of analysis. The
objective analysis was from calculating how close to correct the “pen” was
behaving and the subjective analysis was from the user evaluation of the
prototype. Each of the methods used was
highly effective for its purpose. These
evaluations were necessary to help determine both what method users find most
effective and the effectiveness of the crayon and software for usage.
Discussion
I found the idea of a “stylus” which has multiple settings
for ease of use to be highly intelligent and useful. Personally, I believe that the testing for
which crayon design would be most effective needed more than just user feedback
for accurate data. The user feedback is
helpful but if the users liked type B best and yet that particular crayon was
the least accurate in use, this should affect which crayon design was
selected. This particular design has not
been done before, but there are several different ideas which would be
comparable; because of this I feel that this particular idea is novel, but not
necessary. This is probably not the most
effective use of a digital writing stylus.
After all, how often do you want to change between more than two items
rapidly?
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