Design and Evaluation of Pen Body Commands

Abstract

In current pen-based interactive interfaces, the input channels used by the pen are limited, and target selection and command selection are generally separated sequentially. The intermediate time generated by the movement between target selection and command selection operations further increases the overall operation time. When there are many targets or command operations are frequent, the alternating operations between target selection and command selection easily lead to fatigue. In order to reduce fatigue during frequent movements and decrease multitasking time, we propose pen commands, which can improve the current sequential “select-action” interaction. Based on the differences between the movement trajectories of the pen tip and the pen tail when the pen is rotated, we designed three types of pen body commands. Using the continuous interactive tasks of copy and paste as experimental tasks, we investigated the interactive performance of pen body commands in both target-present and target-absent scenarios through quantitative and qualitative analyses. The experimental results indicate that the interaction time for pen body commands is shorter than that for the combination of rubber band selection and menu clicks, with a performance improvement of 70.448%. Additionally, the error rate of pen body commands is also lower. Based on these results, we analyse the effectiveness of pen body commands and provided usage suggestions and application scenarios.