[Bf-committers] Blender At Your Fingertips: Prototype Unistroke Commands for Tablets

[Jason Wilkins]

I think that single touch and multi touch gestures are two different
parts of the same interface.  Maybe you are hung up on the fact that I
bound the single touch gestures to actions that could be better done
with multitouch gestures, and if so you missed the point.

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Harley Acheson
<harley.acheson at gmail.com> wrote:
> These simple stroke gestures, like we had years ago, now seems so
> anachronistic.  It harkens to a time when we could only track a single
> point of contact from the mouse.  In the video every gesture-drawing step
> looked so unnecessary and time-wasting.
>
> All tablets today support multi-touch interfaces, so there is no longer a
> need to draw a symbol that indicates the  action you wish to take next.
> Instead we want direct interaction with the objects.
>
> The following YouTube video is an example of using multi-touch gestures for
> manipulating 3D objects.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xIK07AhJjc
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Jason Wilkins <jason.a.wilkins at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> More details about the video and the prototype.
>>
>> The recognizer used in the video is very simple to implement and
>> understand.  It is called $1 (One Dollar) and was developed at the
>> University of Washington [1].  We had a seminar recently about
>> interfaces for children and extensions to $1 were presented and I was
>> inspired by their simplicity because it meant I could just jump right
>> in.  It works OK and is good enough for research purposes.
>>
>> One thing $1 does not do is input segmentation.  That means it cannot
>> tell you how to split the input stream into chunks for individual
>> recognition.  What I'm doing right now is segmenting by velocity.  If
>> the cursor stops for 1/4 of a second then I attempt to match the
>> input.  This worked great for mice but not at all for pens due to
>> noise, so instead of requiring the cursor to stop I just require it to
>> slow down a lot.  I'm experimenting with lots of different ideas in
>> rejecting bad input.  I'm leaning towards a multi-modal approach where
>> every symbol has its own separate criteria instead of attempting a
>> one-size-fits-all approach.
>>
>> The recognizer is driven by the window manager and does not require a
>> large amount of changes to capture the information it needs.
>> Different recognizers could be plugged into the interface.
>>
>> The "afterglow" overlay is intended to give important feedback about
>> how well the user is entering commands and to help them learn.  The
>> afterglow gives an indication that a command was successfully entered
>> (although I haven't disabled the display of valid but unbound gestures
>> yet).  The afterglow morphs into the template shape to give the user
>> both a clearer idea of what the gesture was and to help the user fix
>> any problems with their form.
>>
>> In the future I want to use information about the gesture itself, such
>> as its size and centroid, to drive any operator that is called.  For
>> example, drawing a circle on an object might stamp it with a texture
>> whose position and size were determined by the size and position of
>> the circle.
>>
>> Additionally I want to create a new window region type for managing,
>> training, and using gestures.  That might be doable as an add-on.
>>
>> [1] https://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 7:42 AM, Jason Wilkins
>> <jason.a.wilkins at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I've been exploring some research ideas (for university) and using
>> > Blender to prototype them.  I made a short video that demonstrates
>> > what I was able to do the last couple of days.  I'm starting to create
>> > a general framework for sketch recognition in Blender.
>> >
>> > http://youtu.be/IeNjNbTz4CI
>> >
>> > The goal is an interface that could work without a keyboard or most
>> > buttons.  I think a Blender with gestures is far more like Blender
>> > than a Blender that is plastered with big buttons so it works on a
>> > tablet.  It puts everything at your fingertips.
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