Manual Deskterity

Lewis Garmstron brought "Manual Deskterity" to my attention. It's a video by Microsoft Research showing how a pen and touch interface can be used in combination. It's very interesting - one of the objectives was to do this with with no buttons on the pen; just using touch and pen gesture combinations. Personally, I think having a couple little sliders on the pen to change its function would work great but they've demonstrated that you can do a lot without instrumentation on the pen too.

I enjoyed the video because I'm very interested in multi-touch as part of a multi-modal interface for a digital drafting board which could be used by engineers and artists. I've written about a digital drafting board many times before (here, here, and here).