An Empirical Comparison of Pen Pressure and Pen Tilt Input Techniques

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted in this study to investigate the human ability to control pen pressure and pen tilt input, coupling cursor position, angle and scale respectively. Comparisons between pressure input and tilt input have been made in the three experiments. Experimental results show that decreasing pressure input resulted in very bad performance and was not a good input technique for any of the three experiments. In "experiment1-coupling to cursor position", the tilt input technique performed relatively better than the increasing pressure input technique, even though the tilt technique had a slightly higher error rate. In "experiment2-coupling to cursor angle", the tilt input performed relatively better than the increasing pressure input in terms of time. In "experiment3-coupling to cursor scale", tilt input performed a little better than increasing pressure input in terms of adjustment time, but a little worse in terms of the degree of control that users exerted. These results will be useful for further user interface design.