Supporting active reading on pen and touch-operated tabletops

Abstract

With the proliferation and sophistication of digital reading devices, new means to support the task of active reading (AR) have emerged. In this paper, we investigate the use of pen-and-touchoperated tabletops for performing essential processes of AR such as annotating, smooth navigation and rapid searching. We present an application to support these processes and then report on a user study designed to compare the suitability of our setup for three typical tasks against the use of paper media and Adobe Acrobat on a regular desktop PC. From this evaluation, we found out that pen and touch tabletops can successfully combine the advantages of paper and digital devices without their disadvantages. We however also learn from observations and participant feedback that there are still a number of hardware and software limitations that impede the user experience and hence need to be addressed in future systems.

Active Reading of Visualizations

“…This contrasts with the fluid motion of highlighting with a physical highlighter. Because of this, numerous projects have investigated the creation of digital active reading environments, including: XLibris [57], LiquidText [64], GatherReader [27], Matulic and Norrie's pen-and-touch active reading environment [42], and systems that support close reading [33]. The design of some of these digital text reading environments was informed by studies of active reading tasks [29,63].…”

Sensing techniques for tablet+stylus interaction

“…The tools appear next to the finger. The user may then interact with the radial menus using either pen or touch, as studies have consistently found that users expect pen and touch to be interchangable for UI controls [21,34].…”

“…In the modern context of multi-touch tablets, pen input has received renewed interest, particularly when used as a distinct modality in tandem with touch [21,34,55]. However, many problems and ambiguities arise because the system can't easily determine whether the user intends to interact with the pen, with touch, or with the two in combination.…”

Pen and touch gestural environment for document editing on interactive tabletops

“…A particularly powerful manifestation of combined pen and touch interaction is pen-mode switching driven by the NDH, that is, the function performed by the stylus is determined by a specific position or pose of the NDH on the touch screen. Those mode-setting poses can be maintained touch selections of items in a toolbar [17] or finger-based postures [10,11,16]. Requiring users to maintain a function state through continuous muscular tension (a particular instance of a quasimode [20]) as opposed to system-maintained modes activated by single taps or clicks has been shown to be an effective kinaesthetic awareness mechanism to keep a non-regular mode active [16,22].…”

“…Our enabling technology for our pen and touch tabletop system is based on the tried-and-true combination of a DiamondTouch screen [6] and Anoto technology 1 introduced by Brandl et al [4] and used in our previous work [16,17].…”