Wacom: Pen-based Interaction with ArcGIS (#ESRIUC)

What if you could drive ArcGIS not with keyboard or mouse, but with a pen that interacts directly with your display? Would that make your work go faster?

Wacom not only thinks such a solution will enhance productivity, it’s has some numbers to confirm it will. Productivity in one study rose 2-3 times.

So what’s the “product”? It’s a package: a pen, a display and a driver (software). And before you think $$$, the intro package is about $1000 with a 12” inch display. The tools run on any machine running Windows, MacOS or Linux. (Solaris is on the way.)

Note I keep using the term “display” and not “monitor.” I do that intentionally since this is not a monitor as we know it. It sends out signals that determine exactly where the pen is. The pen, interestingly, has no battery. The precision of that location of the pen is one big theme of Wacom’s offering.

The display (and the pen) have a number of customizable buttons that can be tagged with specific commands or scripts from any program it’s set up to support. The pen also can “project” a radial menu (think of a “right click” menu) with different commands assigned to different quadrants of the circle. The idea is that having these “at hand,” not on the keyboard, speeds things along.

There’s nothing special needed to use the Wacom tools with ArcGIS or AutoCAD or SketchUp or anything else. You simply add the app to the driver. That basically says, “when I use this app, use the Wacom pen interface.”

The demo I saw from Mike Dana showed how you can insert points, line and polygons in 9.3. Far more interesting, he suggests, is the new support for sketched features in 9.4. In that case, these graphic would be actual features. Dana noted how this “democratizing” tool will make data creation easy for tech and non-tech people since everyone knows how to use a pen.  He also noted how well it ties into the conference theme of “geodesign.”

While the solution seems to work fine with ArcGIS, I’m still a bit unclear of the problem it solves. Pen interfaces have existed for AutoCAD and other GIS packages on tablet PC in the past (I recall Autodesk Envision on the tablet) and none really took off. Dana and his colleague point out that this solution is much more precise and can take advantage of how hard the user presses, though for now it does not. Further, they point out, all the interest in touch (the iPhone, Microsoft Surface) are getting potential users comfortable with other human-computer interfaces, including potentially, this one.