Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input

Manual Deskterity is a prototype digital drafting table that supports both pen and touch input. We explore a division of labor between pen and touch that flows from natural human skill and differentiation of roles of the hands. We also explore the simultaneous use of pen and touch to support novel compound gestures.

We advocate a division of labor between pen and touch: the pen writes, touch manipulates, and the combination of pen+touch yields new tools. This articulates how our system interprets unimodal pen, unimodal touch, and multimodal pen + touch inputs, respectively. We contribute novel pen + touch gestures that leverage the strengths of both pen and touch; utilizing both modalities to complement one another also enables us to largely sidestep the weaknesses inherent in each modality as well.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Microsoft
• Surface
• Tablet
• PC
• pen
• touch
• multi-touch
• ink
• drafting
• table
• Research
• handwriting
• notebook
• gesture
• input
• sketching
• drawing
• content
• creation

[thebober10]

take that shitpad!

[TheSunSunich]

Stacking and some other actions are not intuitive, but general concept is great!

[ebuTYouian]

Great idea for writing boards, but for tablets or bigger surfaces used by artists, you should find a way to work together with palm rejection (which is turning off touch sensing when active digitizer pen is used). Future tablets (which are developed the fastest today) for sure will use pen and touch input.

[MovGP0]

would love to use Autocad like this...

[TheNoop11000]

Good !

[tranquangduc]

Amazing ! =]]

[012345678963258741]

This is nice, but I want to see it in action with something like Photoshop, Vegas, After Effects and not some shit made for it

[federaly]

Honestly these people saying it laggy and not ready for commerical use and blah blah. If it wasn't already obvious this is cleary in a R&D lab and a technical demo of a IP in progress and not as a product about to be released if ever.

People also saying that they don't see this is useful. That just depends on you imaginationa and the power of the software behind said product. Besides it is in its infancy cut it some slack honestly.

[xmattx343]

Cool, but I really don't see how this is useful

[uputstvo52]

nice

[gvndud]

Oh guys u will not believe that: I' ve a real table with real sheets and a real pen too!! And polaroids!!! Me lucky

[jvd897]

@wendileona You're right in that stuff like this should never replace the real thing. But most of this can already be done in some way with a computer. You can already crop, snip, use stamps, change transparency, etc.; this just shows that you could do it more efficiently with pen and touch, though that won't always be the case. As Microsoft's own Bill Buxton would say, "Everything is best for something and worst for something else. The trick is knowing for what, when, for whom, and why."