Combining and measuring the benefits of bimanual pen and direct-touch interaction on horizontal interfaces

Many research projects have demonstrated the benefits of bimanual interaction for a variety of tasks. When choosing bimanual input, system designers must select the input device that each hand will control. In this paper, we argue for the use of pen and touch two-handed input, and describe an experiment in which users were faster and committed fewer errors using pen and touch input in comparison to using either touch and touch or pen and pen input while performing a representative bimanual task. We present design principles and an application in which we applied our design rationale toward the creation of a learnable set of bimanual, pen and touch input commands.