Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ket that provide a high-resolution depth image of a physical scenery with a high
framerate. The depth image allows to easily capture the deformation of a sheet of
paper. Also the use of flexible electronic paper and OLED displays - as discussed
above - would make our premise obsolete, since the user would not print contents
on paper but would use an electronic device which can be enhanced with sensors for
additional core interactions. Future work should examine further core interactions
of Pen-and-Paper User Interfaces. This concerns manipulations that deform sheets
of paper, covering interactions such as bending [128, 163], folding [70, 71], rolling
[70, 56], and tearing a sheet in two.
Improving Large-scale Collaboration with Paper
A further challenge for future Pen-and-Paper Interfaces is improving collaboration
support. Most current applications focus on a single user. Sharing of handwritten
contents with other users is only supported by a very small number of systems.
In particular, it is still not fully understood how to process, integrate and visual-
ize paper-based contents that are created by a very large community of users. This
point is related to the automatic interpretation of contents. Almost all current sys-
tems interpret pen-and-paper interactions only to a very limited extent. A small set
of gestures might be interpreted (e.g. for creating hyperlinks), but the semantics of
the remaining handwritten contents is not recognized. The systems typically display
only a facsimile of the handwritten contents, sometimes performing handwriting
recognition in the background to allow for full-text search. While this is sufficient
for a single user or for small groups, it is clearly not adequate when it comes to
integrating contents of a large number of users. It will be interesting to see how con-
tents that are created on pen-and-paper can be integrated with tagging platforms,
blogs and social networks, known as the Web 2.0. In the context of our interaction
techniques, this could for example comprise automatically aggregating shared an-
notations, links and tags and recommending relevant annotations, documents and
passages.
Standards and Interoperability
The field is currently characterized by a large number of research prototypes and a
some commercial applications, each of them forming an individual island solution.
As pointed out by Signer et al. [136], an adoption by the mass market requires
more standards and a better interoperability of solutions. This comprises interface
standards that allow application developers to abstract from the specific hardware
solution for pen input. Moreover, there is a need for a common representation of
digital ink data. While with InkML
2
a W3C standard exists, this standard is very
complex and therefore has not become widely accepted yet.
2
http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML
