rene@umcp-cs.UUCP (12/08/83)
I have worked with mice a little, and I must say that though they may
be good for window addressing (is that how'd you say that?) they are
lousy for graphics. Bit pens work much better, more like a pen or
brush. There's no control with a mouse - you must move the entire arm
to move the mouse, whereas with a bit pad you can get fine movements
by moving just your fingers. Track balls are the absolute worse,
though. Anyone work with the graphics side of this tangent of the
discussion?
- rene
--
"Peoles have feeelings, too"
Arpa: rene.umcp-cs@CSNet-relay
Uucp:...{allegra,seismo}!umcp-cs!renejfarrell@sun.uucp (Jerry Farrell) (12/10/83)
Your general point that mice are not as convenient as styli for graphics is valid (somebody at Xerox, I think it was Bob Flegal, once comnpared it to drawing with a brick). But I'm a little surprised at your claim that you have to move your whole arm, elbow, etc. I think this may be an artifact of which mouse you use. I observed a while back that the dePraz mouse (as used in the BLIT) requires a "power grip", which in turn implies large-muscle motions. But the other mice I've used (Hawley [Xerox mechanical], Kirsh [MSI, Sun, others], Lisa's) all are designed for only one or two fingers on top, and enough on the side opposing the thumb to permit finger & wrist manipulation. I just checked on this, and find that I work with a wrist bone planted on the table-top, use wrist rotation for almost any motion in X (I can cover this 80-column window easily), and finger action for small motions in Y (15 lines of text is about the comfortable limit of control). Larger displacements do take arm motion -- but then, so do broad sweeps with a brush. A confounding effect is the location of the sensor -- mechanical designers want to move it back toward the wrist, to make room for the buttons; users want it as close to directly under the index fingertip as possible, to maintain the pointer effect. For frequent changes between keyboard and pointing device, the mouse's stability and cord position make it easier to acquire than a stylus, which is a decided advantage in many UI situations; this and cost probably outweigh the stylus' superiority for fine drawing, especially given the relatively coarse resolution of most existing graphics systems. jf
grunwald@uiuccsb.UUCP (12/11/83)
#R:umcp-cs:-429100:uiuccsb:19000004:000:2461
uiuccsb!grunwald Dec 10 16:49:00 1983
I've recently been using an HP graphics tablet with a stylus for a VLSI
design class. Often times, one spends hours at a time sitting and
interacting with (read: screaming at) the workstations.
Personelly, for this application, I would perfer a mouse. I've used a
Hawley mouse before, connected to a Cadlinc workstation (similar to Sun
workstations). I find that with a pen, I need to keep my arm off the tablet.
Otherwise, my arm affects the tablet in such a way that the cursor jumps all
over the screen. You don't have that kind of trouble with a mouse. I would
actually perfer an optical mouse since you don't have some of the problems that
you do with the Hawley mouse (the ball bearing slips sometimes, causing your to
lose tracking association with the cursor).
Also, having two or three buttons available would be nice (although,
admittedly, the software would have to be changed to utilize them).
I've found that when I use a mouse, I can rest my arm much more, and don't
get as tired. Also, the pens used on this particular graphics tablet don't
always actuate when you press down (this happens on all four workstations after
a while, so it'd not just a single bad tablet). This is annoying, and causes a
lot of frustration on the part of the user. I don't think that the mice on the
market suffer from the same problem.
Also, the wire for the pen is awkward. It gets in your way, mainly because
it is so large. It needs to be shielded to get rid of interference from the
tablet. The mouse wires are usually much smaller and since for an optical
mouse, you only move it on a 4x5 inch surface, there's not much it can get
in the way of.
Admittedly, this is a small sample size of tablets. I would hate to say that
all tablets are useless due to this one experuence. However, for this
particular application, I think it was the wrong choice.
Where would I recommend tablets? Where people have hardcopy they want to
enter. A friend of mine works in a psych lab and uses a digitizer to enter
pictures of neurons for processing. They just lay pictures of the nurons on
the tablet and trace over them. That would obviously be a poor application
for a mouse (and even a pen -- perhaps a puck would be better). But for
applications where one draws "free-hand" (i.e. vlsi design) on the screen,
I prefer the mouse (so far).
Dirk Grunwald
University of Illinois
USENET : ihnp4 ! uiucdcs ! grunwald
CSNET : grunwald.uiuc@Rand-Relayrene@umcp-cs.UUCP (12/11/83)
Perhaps the problem was with the type of mouse; I couldn't possible do
anything with just finger and/or wrist motion. However (I think I'm
repeating myself), you CAN'T draw pictures with a mouse, even if it
was of a better design. Mice are probably good for most graphics
(graphs and stuff) and as pointers (stability is very nice for lots of
mouse-keyboard transfers), but TRY using a paint system (I have). True
the resolution was only about twice that of a TV, but the pen was well
worth whatever difficulties it might have caused (of course, I was
only a user, and didn't pay attention to the other difficulties). Try
drawing a dragon with a mouse! (I actually drew one with a TRACK BALL -
*shudder*)
Can anyone think of a way to get the best of both worlds?
- rene
--
Arpa: rene.umcp-cs@CSNet-relay
Uucp:...{allegra,seismo}!umcp-cs!renejdd@allegra.UUCP (12/14/83)
My experience with multi-speed mice:
The last time I had to build a mouse-tracker from scratch, I made the
tracking nonlinear. My software polled the mouse periodically, obtaining a
delta-x and a delta-y (call them dx and dy). It then computed the effective
dx as (I seem to recall) dx*(dx+1)/2, and dy similarly.
The important properties of that transformation were that 0->0 (so the mouse
didn't move by itself) and that 1->1 (so you could still make small, careful
changes), but that medium-sized values mapped into larger values, so you
could move faster. It was also nice that it could be computed fairly fast.
Other transformations would also work, of course; dx*(dx+2)/3 would also
provide 2->2, and higher-order polynomials would allow for a sharper rise.
When people first started using this software, they would tend to overshoot
distant targets for the first ten minutes, but very quickly became used to
it.
There did not seem to be much trouble with the fact that the x and the y
transformations were computed separately, even though this meant that the
direction of the mouse movement was not preserved. In fact, this might have
been an advantage, since the transformations would tend to make the
direction line up more exactly with the x-axis or y-axis, which is often
what you want.
Cheers,
John ("And This Is Called The `DeTreville' Mouse Transformation") DeTreville
Bell Labs, Murray Hillhenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/17/83)
When I visited New York Tech some years ago, all their tablets had
pens rather than pucks. Why? Because a substantial fraction of the
use of those systems was by real, honest-to-Ghod *artists*, who absolutely
insisted on pens. I think they were right. I would put a mouse (or
something similar) on a workstation I put together for myself, but
I'm not an artist.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henryucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP (12/18/83)
#R:umcp-cs:-429100:ucbesvax:25800004:000:1175 ucbesvax!turner Dec 11 15:44:00 1983 Re: whole-arm motion for mouse, vs. stylus net.works had some discussion a while back about a "5-speed mouse", which is a hack to the mouse driver that makes rate of cursor motion more than proportional to rate of mouse motion. So, for example, a wrist-snap could send the cursor flying off to far corners of the screen. Slower motions would give detail. Not sure that I'd want this feature for a hand-written character- recognizer, but then I wouldn't want a mouse for that anyway. Presumably, this feature could be turned on and off. The only commercial offering I've heard of (in net.works) was from one of the LISP machine companies. This is off the subject, but I once saw a neat gimmick in a hospital: a stylus arrangement that converted handwriting on a pad to handwriting in a remote room, apparently so that doctor's prescriptions could be communicated instantly to the pharmacy, saving patient's and doctor's time. I think it was all analog circuitry. Kind of Rube Goldberg, but interesting. (Of course, considering the proverbial opacity of doctors' handwriting, one wonders just how great this invention was.) --- Michael Turner (ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner)
rpw3@fortune.UUCP (12/19/83)
#R:umcp-cs:-429100:fortune:29300002:000:2185
fortune!rpw3 Dec 19 00:36:00 1983
John DeTreville's response about transformations to mouse input brings
something to mind that a trackball/joystick salesman said to me at
COMDEX nearly two years ago. He was complaining that nobody gave
trackballs a fair chance because nobody used them right. His points
were (as best I can recall):
1. Mice are good at pointing because humans have a predominately
translation/position-sensitive feedback mechanism in performing
pointing actions. Mice supply translation-style input; balls,
joysticks, thumbwheels (Tek 4010), and dials (HP 9816) don't.
(Light pens supply the right input, but the resolution stinks.)
2. BUT... If you pre-transform the input data from the acquisition
device such that the transformed data meets the expectation
of the human kinesthetic servo-loop, you can get mouse-equivalent
or (here's the kicker) better performance out of some of those
others.
His claim was that) they had hired a consulting firm to do the analysis
of the servo-loop parameters (impulse response, poles, zeros, gain, etc.)
[loop = eye -> brain -> hand -> pointing device -> software -> display -> eye]
for a particular (military) target acquisition task, and that they had
found that a force-operated joystick (one that doesn't move, you just
push on it) was as good [good = f(speed,accuracy,fatigue)] as any of
the devices listed above. In fact, even the thumb-sized ones on the end
of a control stick could be made nearly as good.
The computations weren't particularly complex, and could have a fairly
low accuracy, as long as [here's where John DeT's note reminded me]
zero-input => zero-motion and small-input => small-motion. (Also,
the dead-zone should not be much (if any) bigger than a small-input.)
Obviously, the salesman was trying to sell me his product, which was
trackballs and (mostly) force joysticks. But some of his devices were
MUCH cheaper than mice, so I'm curious... Does anyone else know
of more work on "pre-compensating" human input with "matched filters"?
Rob Warnock
UUCP: {sri-unix,amd70,hpda,harpo,ihnp4,allegra}!fortune!rpw3
DDD: (415)595-8444
USPS: Fortune Systems Corp, 101 Twin Dolphins Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065dave@rocksvax.UUCP (Dave Sewhuk) (12/24/83)
I don't like your arguments about "it had to have pens because the artists
wanted pens". That argument is a dumb as the one I heard about C.A.T. scanners.
The doctors didn't like the neat 2D graphic outputs at all, they only wanted
little slices through their patients bodies, because that was how they disected
bodies in school and could only think in 1 dimension, little slices. They
didn't like the rotating kidneys on the screen, only little slices through
them. Using you arguments you would think there is no need to try any other
display method and give them a fair shake.
People always seem to abhor change, good or bad.... or maybe they were
just put out that they didn't think of it first!!
--
Dave
Arpa: Sewhuk.HENR@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
uucp: {allegra, rochester, ritcv, ritvp, amd70, sunybcs}!rocksvax!davehenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/29/83)
I agree that there is a potential problem with people insisting on
doing things the old way for no good reason. The point is that in
the case of artists, they have nontrivial motor skills which are
very much tied to pen-like objects. I don't know how much retraining
would be involved to get the same skills down pat with (say) a puck,
but I do know that the machines are supposed to adapt to us and not
the other way around! Claiming that the artists ought to be retrained
is like IBM's claim that I ought to get used to an extra key between
Z and SHIFT -- an outrageous imposition for no good reason.
Dave Sewhuk's example of doctors disliking new forms of presentation
from a CAT scanner is similar: ok, they disliked the rotating kidney
because it was unfamiliar, but their diagnostic training was built
around the old thin-slices style of presentation. It does seem likely
that the new form will make things easier in the long run, but in the
short run I would want my kidneys checked over by a doctor using a form
of presentation that he was familiar with. There is a big difference
between making new forms available and making old forms unavailable!
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry