Designing Interactions that Combine Pen, Paper, and Computer
Ron B. Yeh (Stanford)

Friday, October 26th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/297739/

ABSTRACT:
Pen and paper are powerful tools for visualizing designs, penning music, and communicating through the written language. This coupling is mobile, flexible, graspable, and robust. By adding computation, we can add in the power of technology, including search, redundancy, and remote collaboration. The introduction of digital pens that capture a person's handwriting has now made it feasible to augment paper with computation. We refer to these as paper + digital interfaces.

Developing paper + digital interfaces is challenging. Programmers need to abstract input into high-level events, coordinate interactions across time, and manage output on devices. This is difficult, because interface programmers are accustomed to working with graphical applications that provide real-time feedback on a single display.

We created PaperToolkit to help programmers build applications with pen and paper. PaperToolkit introduces abstractions and tools to enhance development and testing of these interfaces. We evaluated the toolkit through extended use in research projects, a class deployment with 17 teams (69 students) and an analysis of the source code produced by those teams. The evaluation found the abstractions and tools to be highly effective.

Beyond PaperToolkit, this work includes ButterflyNet, a paper notebook that automatically structures field data, and GIGAprints, large paper prints that support visual search and collaboration. Using PaperToolkit, inspiring applications such as ButterflyNet and GIGAprints could have been built in much less time. The toolkit is open source, and is used today in research laboratories around the world, including labs at LRI Paris, University of Siegen, Darmstadt University of Technology, and at Stanford University.

BIO
Ron Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University. He studies Human-Computer Interaction, and is advised by Scott Klemmer. He also works closely with Andreas Paepcke and Terry Winograd. Much of his work is part of BioACT, which contributes new technology approaches for field biology researchers. He received his B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2001.

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