Pen + Mid-Air: An Exploration of Mid-Air Gestures to Complement Pen Input on Tablets.

In this paper, we report on a series of studies, exploring the potential of pen and mid-air input on tablets. We describe a field study with an early prototype of a drawing application and follow-up inquiries, such as the development and comparison of gesture sets for pen and mid-air input and pen and multi-touch input with users in a lab environment. Overall, our results suggest that pen and mid-air input should be offered to complement traditional pen and multi-touch input on tablets. We illustrate the final user-defined gestures set for pen and mid-air input and discuss how user preferences of mid-air gestures over touch gestures seem to depend on the complexity of operations and the need of additional menus on the screen.