Tracing and Sketching Performance using Blunt-tipped Styli on Direct-Touch Tablets

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduce myself - co-authors – paper about evaluating the tracing and sketching performance on digital tablets
• #3: Need for paper in day-to-day activities – newspapers, novels, and maps – replaced with well-designed tablet applications. [Segway] tablet replacing paper for content consumption. But what about content creation? For example, an industrial design
• #4: Industrial design – requires paper for drafting – content creation – custom hardware for sketching and design [Segway] Provide natural interaction For example, with digital media you no longer need to use a copier to share your ideas, you can just transfer them with a button click. Although such tools exist they cannot promise better adaptability of designers to digital medium. The question we ask is whether you can sketch on a tablet as seamlessly or naturally as on a paper?
• #5: Coming back – Wacom devices direct/in-direct interaction replace paper - but there are also numerous mobile devices – direct-touch – why not use them? [Segway] For one thing, the capacitive touch tablets have finger input
• #6: [Segway] For one thing, the capacitive touch tablets have finger inpu As kids used to finger painting – its messy – but learn how to draw shapes with fingers – still we are more used to pen input
• #7: Luckily, we now have digital styli, that can replace enable pen-like input to tablets – numerous models – differ in tip dimensions, material etc. – we have considered a common representative Wacom Bamboo (best consumer feedback).
• #8: Considering the digital tech -- Designer’s notebook – repository of sketches of ideas – may not be fully mature – represents early-design process – these design notebooks are useful because – small, portable [Segway] considering all the digital technology we have right now, what is stopping us from replacing this?
• #9: A typical early design has multiple steps. Play animation Can we replace pen and paper with digital tools (tablets, styli)? [Segway] aspects – that affect tablets
• #10: We have identified 4 aspects – familiarity – occlusion – friction – parallax [segway] objective of our research – compare the performance of touch tablets with paper – ecological valid study with less constraints – similar attempts in past to compare input devices. Bridging pen-paper and digital
• #11: Accot and Zhai 1999 Zabramski et al. 2011 both handled tracing tasks did a rigorous study with multiple shape tracing [Segway] since we target both sketching and tracing, as in early design, we did two user studies [Need to show roadmap at the end]
• #12: 14 participants – students from various departments in Purdue University – all had novice level exposure to design through a toy design course 3 media – 2 tasks – multiple shapes – 5 shapes – 2 shapes. We conducted a user study to understand the performance of three medium + input combinations i.e., stylus + tablet, finger + tablet, and pen + paper for sketching and tracing. Inspired by the previous research work in evaluating various input devices for tracing different shapes using Steering’s law, we have chosen 5 different shapes for tracing and two common 3D shapes for sketching. We recruited 14 participants (13 male + 1 female) from various departments in our University. They were all students and they only had beginner-level experience to early design. In essence, they were not expert designers.
• #13: Tracing tasks – 5 shapes increasing complexity in curvature – participants asked to keep to an error tunnel – 3 times of each medium (so that we can compare pen-paper with tablet) [Mention how the task was done on paper] - video recorded and analyzed
• #14: Tracing speed – faster on tablet with stylus input – followed by finger with tablet – pen-paper – just put in the average values for your reference – significant
• #15: Tracing failures – least on pen-paper – followed by stylus tablet – finger tablet – pen-paper significantly better but finger-tablet had the worst failures
• #16: In the post-survey questionnaire – we asked comfort, confidence, accuracy – pen-paper – stylus 12, 10, 10 – while only most of the participants were not with pen-paper [Segway] this covers the tracing tasks, following this the participants did sketching task
• #17: Sketching tasks – 2 shapes – 3d shapes – 3 times of each medium (so that we can compare pen-paper with tablet) – participants selected the best representative sketch Analysis – instead of using image processing techniques, that are hard to define – used sketch quality measure from crowdsourcing – lineups of sketches – choose one -- ratios In each lineup, 5 sketches from the library of 42 submitted sketches for each shape was randomly displayed in a single row.
• #18: 277 respondents – for sketch quality - 5,440 individual responses – and from this *[enter slide]*
• #19: In the post-survey questionnaire – again pen-paper (of course) – but this time stylus 9, 8, 7 and finger were similar except for accuracy – this can be due to the large occlusion [Segway] looking from the aspects perspective
• #20: *Hard to quantify Familiarity to pen-paper > tablet - occlusion is more for finger (tip size) – friction couldnot be quantified but the perception is that more on pen-paper – parallax is more on tablet screen [Segway] clearly the media differ in these aspects but if we look at the results again
• #21: Tablet with stylus and paper performed comparably* [Segway] so far we have looked at using existing generic input styli for direct-touch tablets. – followed with a different study - Blunt vs Sharp-tipped (Samsung note device). Coming to the second part of our paper,
• #22: Now-a-days we have tablets with better styli such as Samsung note – they have a hard tip for handwriting – so we wanted to compare them with the blunt-tipped Wacom bamboo stylus in the follow-up study
• #23: Additional bearing block (no motivation)– Sharp tipped can be used for intricate shapes..
• #24: The tasks were similar to before but this due to the low participant pool we had to do a expert voting for sketch quality rather than crowdsourcing. Three repetitions – one selection - Not using lineups – but pair-wise selections by expert judges.
• #25: Speed was higher!!!! Not much …The results were not significant
• #27: Most of the participants were Comfortable with blunt tipped stylus – because the dimensions match a normal pen (quoted)
• #29: Accuracy, of course, was better for hard-tipped stylus
• #30: *Hard to quantify Looking from aspects the devices clearly were different – occlusion was more on the blunt tip but the questionnaire – doesn’t translate to this – because **tip size is one thing but form factor also matters** Samsung designed a small pen **
• #31: Results not much but summarizing, we are planning to do a more rigorous study in future but
• #32: We can take these results into account to replace the traditional design notebook with digital tools for tablets
• #33: Blunt-tip stylus is not so bad – if we can add features to improve the accuracy – form factor is important – Thank you!! If you disagree with any of the findings here we can have a discussion now or even offline
• #34: More details refer to the paper!