Multimodal Collaborative Handwriting Training for Visually-Impaired People

Beryl Plimmer, Andrew Crossan, Stephen A. Brewster, and Rachel Blagojevic

Summary

The authors present McSig a learning system for teaching visually-impaired students handwriting and how to sign their names. The system consists of a force-feedback device that restricts movement of a pen while learning. The force-feedback is gradually reduced as a student becomes more familiar with how a shape is drawn. A teacher is able convey how something is drawn by drawing it on a separate screen, and the force-feedback device replicates the drawing movement. They conducted an evaluation consisting of 8 visually-impaired students over the age of 10 and still in school. The evaluation highlighted design issues and provided indication that this system could possibly help the visually-impaired learn handwriting.

Discussion

The work is interesting. It's always great to see work applying technology to help make lives easire for a those in need, even when they are only a small subset of the population. The force-feedback echoing when the teacher draws a shape seems like a nice and helpful idea for teaching. I wonder if a device such as this could be used to improve motor skills of those you have injured their hands and need physical therapy.

Sketch Recogniton User Interfaces: Guidelines for Design and Development

Christine Alvarado

Summary

The author introduces SkRUIs, sketch recognition user interfaces, as new type of interface not addressed in previous literature. Prior work has focused on HCI for pen-based input or sketch recognition, but not the combination of the two. An example application for drawing diagrams for a power presentation is presented. The author states that traditional HCI evaluation techniques are not entirely suited for SkRUIs, and these techniques require modification to support SkRUIs.

Discussion

While it's nice to see research being done in this area, I'm not convinced by the work. Why can't Powerpoint support incorporation of sketch recognition for diagramming? Why must it be done in a separate application? Doing beautification on window switches doesn't seem like the best idea. What if I'm drawing, but I get an instant message in the middle and decide to check it. I may not be ready for beautification to occur. A SkRUI is still a GUI, just more specific. The interaction fundamentals of GUI design still apply.

Fluid Sketches: Continuous Recognition and Morphing of Simple Hand-Drawn Shapes

James Avro and Kevin Novins

Summary

The authors introduce a new form of visual feedback about sketch recognition. Feedback is provided as shapes are drawn. The approach beautifies portions of the current stroke to reflect the recognition systems understanding of what is being drawn by the user. The approach works for two shapes, circles and squares.

Discussion

The approach is novel and interesting. There are two main problems I find with this work. One, it only works with two shapes. Two, they don't evaluate the effects of the feedback on human attention. Does it disrupt drawing? Do users find themselves waiting for feedback before drawing too far into a stroke?