Reference Information
Title: Hands-On Math: A page-based multi-touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving
Names of authors: Robert Zeleznik, Andrew Bragdon, Ferdi Adeputra, Hsu-Sheng Ko
Presentation venue: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Summary:
Students, professionals and engineers have to choose between flexible, free-form input of pencil and paper and the computational power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). There is no method of interaction or technology that incorporates the two into something that's one easy-to-use, yet powerful, thus reducing the barriers in accessing computational algebra systems while solving math problem. Hands-On Math is a multi-touch and pen-based system which attempts to unify these approaches by providing virtual paper that is enhanced to recognize mathematical notations as a means of providing in situ access to the CAS functionality. It uses Microsoft Surface that runs on a tabletop screen and StarPad SDK to convert handwritten mathematical equations to digital format. Pages can be created and organized on a large pannable desktop and mathematical expressions can be computed, graphed and manipulated using a set of uni and bi-manual interactions which facilitate rapid exploration by eliminating tedious and error prone transcription tasks. Analysis of a qualitative pilot evaluation indicated the potential of the approach and highlighted the issues with the novel techniques used.
Discussion:
The idea of incorporating hand gestures and solving of math equations is brilliant. I have myself been in such situations before, and have been lazy to plug in the equations into CAS. Writing the equations on smart whiteboards and using gesture recognition to recognize the equations and converting them to digital format will make the task very easy and save a lot of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment