Research On Strategies Of Combining Touch Interaction And Pen-based Interaction

Touch interaction and pen-based interaction,the striking advantages of which are natural to control,intuitive and easy to learn,are favored by many users.However,both of touch and pen have some drawbacks:the precision of touch input is low and touch is not suitable for precise input;the bandwidth of pen input is weak and pen has trouble in doing complex operations.To improve the above mentioned problems and enhance the coordination and usability of touch and pen interaction,this research proposes a strategy of combining touch and pen interaction and the research work is as followed:Firstly,an empirical comparison of touch and pen is conducted to evaluate the feature of input performance,which lays the basis for the following combining strategy.Experimental results show that the operation time and error rate of pen is significantly lower than that of touch.The smaller the target is,the lower the time and error rate of touch is.The time and error rate of pen is relatively stable.Secondly,a qualitative study is conducted to examine the natural user's habitual profile of using touch and pen and summary the current existing problems of touch and pen.Based on the qua.ntitative and qualitative study results,we proposed six strategy to combine touch and pen,which are strategy of combining touch+pen based on input precision,strategy of combining touch+pen based on major and auxiliary input channel,strategy of combining touch+pen based on bimanual interaction,strategy of combining touch+pen based on gesture command,strategy of combining touch+pen based on unimanual interaction and strategy of combining touch+pen based on extra medium.Thirdly,a touch+pen software framework is developed to enables parallel touch and pen input simultaneously.This framework also solves key problems in combining touch and pen input,which are identifying and labeling touch and pen input,and detecting palm false input.Based on the above mentioned strategies,we design three touch+pen techniques,which are pen+single touch,pen+touch gesture and pen+multi-touch.Then an empirical experiment is conducted to evaluate these three touch+pen techniques and compare them with independent touch and pen respectively.Results show that the three pen+touch techniques reduce the operation time significantly and improve the task accuracy.Among the three techniques,pen+touch gesture exhibited the best performance,with pen+multi-touch and pen+single touch coming next.Lastly,a touch+pen interaction prototype is built,and the operating principle,building process,identifying method,developing technique and operation effect are presented.