Hands: Student feedback

[amyjko]

I felt that it took too long to get to the point of the chapter (hands). The first paragraph was quite lengthy in its setup. It also included a long quote, which distracted me from getting through the chapter. I already felt myself skimming and had to actually read the quote 3 times before really reading it.

This was a very long sentence that was confusing to get through. It was distracting not only because of the length, but also because of how much information was contained in the one sentence. I think the 3 later technologies mentioned were summarized pretty well. I understood what they were about, but also was interested in learning more about them. However, the summary for Ono’s technology made me want to read more about it because I was more confused than clued into what it was.

“These leverage the skill of grasping a pen or pencil that many are familiar with from manual writing, which is often taught in school.” I thought the “which is often taught in school” part was redundant with the “many are familiar with.” It doesn’t matter where it was learned, because I think most people who would be reading this would grasp why many are familiar with writing with pen and pencil.

I don’t know if it was just the nature of the chapter, the Touch, Pens, and Gestures sections seemed a bit thin and made this chapter seem like it lacked a lot of substance as compared to other chapters. These sections seemed more like “here’s a list of cool stuff people did in these three things.” I found myself bored in this chapter because it was just a list of hand inputs that I would want to read more about later and not much discussion. I think my favorite part of your previous chapters is the discussion you go into and how you weave together a narrative for the history of these interfaces, and then implications for the future. However, again, this chapter just seemed almost like a categorized list of cool input technologies. I think adding more commentary into the implications, or just combining this chapter with your next few chapters discussion non traditional pointer interfaces might combat this. Alternatively, people might not be reading this chapter by chapter as we are, so maybe they will breeze through this and the next few chapters and it is alright as is.

[amyjko]

More thoughts:

• Organize the input devices.
• Interesting theories about social norms and acceptability of these input techniques to discuss.
• Clarify relationship between continuous tracking and discrete recognition. Continuous tracking can be used for discrete recognition.
• Connect to theory in earlier chapters. What are the gulfs?

[amyjko]

This chapter does great job of comprehensively explaining the history and current research in the field of hands as an embodied form of computing. The first section is particularly succinct and effectively provides background and sets the stage for the following content. While I think you do a good job of progressing from touch to pens to gestures and finally hand tracking, I found myself wanting just slightly more depth to each paragraph. I appreciate the breadth of topics that each section covered, but I felt as though breadth sacrificed detail.

I think it might be beneficial to open up the chapter by briefly mentioning the current state of hands as embodied computing to allow the reader to familiarize with what history they are about to be exposed to. That said, I do think that the Weiser quote is essentially the perfect introduction to what’s to come- perhaps it could come just after a brief statement of what kind of contemporary technology we are focusing on.

[amyjko]

I am also very interested in some other form of the touch like 3-dimensional spherical touch and the one that is using any surface as a touch screen using depth-sensing cameras and projectors. I am wondering why these awesome technologies haven’t launched on consumer devices yet. Is it because of the technical limitation, manufactory limitation or marketing choice?

Besides touch, gesture, and pens, I wonder what kind of interaction type is the dial in Microsoft Studio? Are there more types of hand interaction out there?