Research On Pen-based User Interfaces--Theory, Technique And Implementation

Pen-based User Interface (PUI) as a major form of Post-WIMP user interfaces provides natural and efficient interactions. It is generally designed based on the Pen-Paper metaphor which is a universal and fundamental way for capturing daily experiences, communicating ideas, recording important events, conducting deep thinking and visual descriptions. Researches on PUI intend to make these traditional and ubiquitous activities computable with keeping the naturalness of them. Consequently, with the assistance of computing resources, people can achieve easier manipulations to information, such as maintenance, modification, retrieval, transferring, further processing and analysis. PUI is bringing many new features to these activities other than just simulating them. Researches on PUI will promote the development of computer science itself as well as other areas. The author focuses on human-centered intelligent PUI, which allows freedom sketching. This dissertation systematically describes the author.s work on theory, techniques and implementation of PUI, which includes an interactive model called LEAFF based on hybrid automata, a technology ofincremental intention extraction, a toolkit named Penbuilder for supporting PUI development and a prototype system, i.e.SketchPoint, for note-taking and presentation. By comprehensive analyses of state of the art of PUI, the author gives a survey of PUI researches, a classification of PUI applications and the major forms of interactive environments for PUI, which involve not only software but also hardware. The author also discusses the cooperation between computer science and psychology during PUI researches. －III－ Research on Pen-based User Interfaces: Theory, Technique and Implementation The Pen-Paper metaphor is emphasized as the basis for PUI design. This dissertation describes the idea for content-centered user interface design. Byanalyzing the essences of PUI interaction, the author designed a semi-formal tool, i.e. LEAFF, for modeling the PUI interaction, which is based on a formal method of hybrid...