Fluid Inking: Augmenting the Medium of Free-Form Inking with Gestures

Authors: Robert Zeleznik,Timothy Miller from CS Dept, Brown University.

Summary:
Three areas that this paper concentrates on - Pen based menu interaction, gesturing while inking and gestures and widgets.

Pen based menu interaction: The press and hold interaction is used to invoke menus. The user should hold till a timeout (500ms). This may be reduced when pressure exceeds a threshold.Gestural shortcuts are similar to CTRL / ALT keys. A flick or a terminal punctuation(pause) is used for triggering shortcuts. The menus can be copies / torn off as buttons to facilitate repetitive actions(Tear - off shortcuts). Gesture sequence and context is used to differentiate similar tokens.
Self contained gestures: Examples are paste(L), select and delete gestures.
Mnemonic punctuates gestures - 'C' gesture can be confused with 'Cut' / 'Copy' functionality, so a longer form both these commands are provided. 'C' and 'X' are shorter versions and 'Copy' / 'Cut' mnemonics are made available.
Mimetic punctuated gestures - mimetic action is marking menus of the flowMenu, just that the menu does not appear on the screen. Example: User draws a stroke hook on the NE direction of the lasso( selecting stroke gesture), since the cut menu appears in the NE direction of the flowMenu. The menu doesnot appear on the screen but the position of the stroke hook corresponds to the 'Cut' menu in the flow Menu list.

Feedback: 2 mechanisms of feedback
* Verbose Feedback - The gesture strokes are different in color and there are text prompts on the screen on the possible set of gestures that can follow.
* Subdued feedback - Different color patterns are followed for non - gesture strokes, incomplete gestures and completed gestures.

Widgets - Widget is provided at tap location for scaling and dragging. At time, this causes problems, when users accidentally pass through the widget causing inadvertent drags / when users miss widget target.

Discussion:
this paper has listed almost all the possible methods of interacting in the pen based input scenario.I need to go through this once more.