Tracing and sketching performance using blunt-tipped styli on direct-touch tablets

Abstract

Direct-touch tablets are quickly replacing traditional pen-and-paper tools in many applications, but not in case of the designer's sketchbook. In this paper, we explore the tradeoffs inherent in replacing such paper sketchbooks with digital tablets in terms of two major tasks: tracing and free-hand sketching. Given the importance of the pen for sketching, we also study the impact of using a blunt-and-soft-tipped capacitive stylus in tablet settings. We thus conducted experiments to evaluate three sketch media: pen-paper, finger-tablet, and stylus-tablet based on the above tasks. We analyzed the tracing data with respect to speed and accuracy, and the quality of the free-hand sketches through a crowdsourced survey. The pen-paper and stylus-tablet media both performed significantly better than the finger-tablet medium in accuracy, while the pen-paper sketches were significantly rated higher quality compared to both tablet interfaces. A follow-up study comparing the performance of this stylus with a sharp, hard-tip version showed no significant difference in tracing performance, though participants preferred the sharp tip for sketching.

Understanding and Comparing Smartphone and Tablet Use

“…The everyday use of tablets by the general public has similarly not received wide attention in research. Instead, investigations have focused on specific aspects of use, such as education (e.g., Jahnke, Svendsen, Johansen, & Zander, 2014), healthcare (e.g., Lin et al, 2013), touch and gestures (e.g., Kleimola, Laine, Litvinova, & Vuorimaa, 2013), and the use of styli (e.g., Badam, Chandrasegaran, Elmqvist, & Ramani, 2014). Further, only specific populations have been studied, such as children (e.g., Mohd Shukri & Howes, 2014), students (e.g., Bryfczynski, Pargas, Cooper, & Klymkowsky, 2012), those with autism (e.g., Hourcade, Williams, Miller, Huebner, & Liang, 2013), health care providers (e.g., Li & Alem, 2013), patients (e.g., Jacobs, Clawson, & Mynatt, 2014), and office workers (e.g., Stawarz, Cox, Bird, & Benedyk, 2013).…”

Kinesthetically Augmented Mid-Air Sketching of Multi-Planar 3D Curve-Soups

“…For the mesh-guided tasks (T1), our goal was to quantify the deviation of the user generated curve soup with respect to the ground-truth, i.e., the edges on the cube and frustum models. While there are existing approaches in sketch based accuracy evaluation such as the one proposed by Badam et al [39], they measure performance in pixel space. In contrast, our techniques are in geometric space.…”

Supporting collaborative design activity in a multi-user digital design ecology

“…Most large interactive surfaces currently available still impose challenges in relation to support for sketching (e.g. Badam, Chandrasegaran, Elmqvist, & Ramani, 2014). The vertical displays (IWB and non-interactive displays, Table 1, columns 2 and 4) were considered the best options to help designers visualise the whole design.…”