Paper Reading #3- Pen + touch = new tools

Title: Pen + touch = new tools
Reference Information:
Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, Bill Buxton. "Pen + touch = new tools". UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0271-5.
Author Bios:
Dr. Ken Hinckley is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft. He has been a part of many publications of relevance in the past. His Ph.D work involved developing a props-based interface for neurosurgeons.
Koji Yatani is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Toronto. He will finish it up this year and join Microsoft in the Human-Computer Interaction Research Group in Beijing.
Michel Pahud got a Ph.D in parallel computing from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He is now with Microsoft and has been involved in several groups and group projects.
Nicole Coddington is a Senior Interaction Designer with STC. She used to be with Microsoft. She graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor's degree in Visual Communications.
Jenny Rodenhouse is currently at Microsoft. She has worked with the XBox inside of the Interactive Entertainment Division. She has attended both the University of Wisconsin and Syracuse University.
Andy Wilson is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft. He earned his Bachelor's at Cornell University, as well as his Master's and Ph.D from MIT.
Hrvoje Benko works in the Microsoft Research group. He receieved his Ph.D from Columbia University.
Bill Buxton is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft. He earned his Master's in Computer Science from Toronto University and is still a staff member there as well.
Summary:

• Hypothesis: It is possible to efficiently and comfortably satisfy both pen and touch technologies in a single device.
• Methods: One way in which the authors tested how users interact with a physical piece of paper with a pen/manipulating tools (i.e. scissors) is by recording their interactions with a physical notebook. The authors told the 8 volunteers (all right-handed) to create a hypothetical short film and to be creative. The results of this experiment were taped and also physically recorded to find patterns of interactions. These results led to the implementation of the device's interactions with users. After the initial design was carefully thought through, another group of volunteers was chosen to test the smoothness and naturalness of the device.
• Results: The authors found that the test users began to form habits around patterns of the system. Users commented frequently about how natural using the device was in relation to using a physical notebook or pen and paper. This was accredited to the careful study and planning of the implementation of the gestures to initiate the study. Only on the more complex features of the device did the users need guidance. By this, I (and the authors) mean that the pen+touch features combined were not clear; it was not "natural" to know what all the device was capable of, therefore, the users needed some instruction about some of these features.
• Conents: In this paper, the authors and creators sought to show off their created work. Before designing the device, they planned case studies of typical students with physical notebooks to note interactions and gestures. After designing the device, they tested it out in practical situations with typical users to gather reactions and feedback from the users' trials with the product. The whole point of this experiment was to see whether the technologies of a pen and paper and of digital technologies and functions could be merged and implemented as a single device (since each technology has its own advantages and disadvantages).

Discussion:
I think that the idea of having pen+touch yielding new tools is great. These guys (and girls) really nailed the ways of "natural" use of a pen and of touching functions wielded into a single device. This device is really similar to the device referenced to in Blog#2. Both devices seem to work (relatively) flawlessly from what the experimental results showed. In this case, the users seemed very happy and satisfied with using this device and the period of time for a "learning curve" seemed to be short among the users. I believe that the authors definitely achieved their goals with this work. I believe that this device was superior to the "Hands-OnMath" device in that here the authors took the users into account moreso than the authors and creators of the "Hands-OnMath" device did. This kind of device could definitely become a mainstream device soon; it could also serve as a springboard for other devices or technologies to incorporate.