Consider a not-too-distant scenario in which scientists use tablets with digital pens as extensible electronic lab notebooks. Each of these ‘notebooks’ is the size and weight of a pad of paper but is actually an “infinite” virtual piece of paper that permits sketching ideas for annotated graphical, diagrammatic, and mathematical designs, including proof-of-concept simulations, and engaging in interactions with collaborators on shared portions of the workspace. As they seamlessly move among domains, scientists can have the recognition software assign domain-specific semantic interpretation to the digital ink as appropriate or leave the ink as design or annotation marks.
There is still a large distance between such a vision and what we have today: siloed applications operating in their own windows and relying on a 30-year-old keyboard-and-mouse interaction paradigm. While keyboarding is a fast and natural means of linear text entry, many other tasks such as the entry of mathematical or chemical notations require a cognitively demanding encoding of 2D notations into linear ones that is distracting at best, unnatural at worst. Current technical advances provide exciting new opportunities to interpret digital ink as commands and application objects in appropriate ways. Such a context-sensitive interpretation often involves inferencing and extensive use of gestures fluidly intermixed with notations natural to the domain.
This talk will demo three education-oriented prototypes in math sketching, chemistry, and a diagram creation tool, and then describe some of the research issues that the Microsoft Research Center in Pen-Centric Computing at Brown University is addressing.Consider a not-too-distant scenario in which scientists use tablets with digital pens as extensible electronic lab notebooks. Each of these ...all »Consider a not-too-distant scenario in which scientists use tablets with digital pens as extensible electronic lab notebooks. Each of these ‘notebooks’ is the size and weight of a pad of paper but is actually an “infinite” virtual piece of paper that permits sketching ideas for annotated graphical, diagrammatic, and mathematical designs, including proof-of-concept simulations, and engaging in interactions with collaborators on shared portions of the workspace. As they seamlessly move among domains, scientists can have the recognition software assign domain-specific semantic interpretation to the digital ink as appropriate or leave the ink as design or annotation marks.
There is still a large distance between such a vision and what we have today: siloed applications operating in their own windows and relying on a 30-year-old keyboard-and-mouse interaction paradigm. While keyboarding is a fast and natural means of linear text entry, many other tasks such as the entry of mathematical or chemical notations require a cognitively demanding encoding of 2D notations into linear ones that is distracting at best, unnatural at worst. Current technical advances provide exciting new opportunities to interpret digital ink as commands and application objects in appropriate ways. Such a context-sensitive interpretation often involves inferencing and extensive use of gestures fluidly intermixed with notations natural to the domain.
This talk will demo three education-oriented prototypes in math sketching, chemistry, and a diagram creation tool, and then describe some of the research issues that the Microsoft Research Center in Pen-Centric Computing at Brown University is addressing.«
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