TechPost#2: The Technological Development of Graphics Tablet throughout history.

The history of a graphic tablet is quite fascinating. Descending from what we come to know as a fax machine in the modern society, it has made a giant leap in the process of digitalizing a society. The first use of a graphic tablet was to recognize and digitalize handwriting. It is in the Common Era that graphic table is mainly used by designers, although, its full potentials are yet to be discovered.

Looking into the history of how the writing itself has developed, we can trace back the precedent of a graphic tablet in the religious teachings all around the world. Tablets of Stone, Tablets of Law, Tablets of Testimony, those have many names in different cultures, but the main idea is the same: something was written on them to be kept, taught and developed. The next step in development of written messages was made in the ancient Egypt. With the papyrus, the first paper, graphic tablet loses its relevancy and stays in the past and we do not hear about it until the Industrial Revolution.

The need to communicate instantly over the distances pushed forward the invention of a telephone in the 19^th century. (Industrial Revolution, 2009) In 1888, Elisha Gray patents the Telautograph, which simply was “an analog precursor to the modern fax machine”. (Wikipedia, 2009) It was used to transmit handwriting or a drawing over a two-wire circuit, and was mainly used in banks and large hospitals to transmit signatures.  This was a first step to the Online Banking, as we know it. Of course, it made lives of busy individuals as well as corporations much easier, when to complete a transaction one did not actually need to be at the bank branch; although, together with accuracy and speed, it did open a completely new field for the fraud. Later on, with the great wars at the World’s doors, the development of a graphic tablet slows down and we will not hear of it until the post-industrial era.

Beginning of the post-industrial era is symbolized by a radical change from manufacturing based economy to a service based economy. (Wikipedia, 2009) Understanding the importance of new technology’s impacts on itself, post-industrial society sets a new priority and special importance to the science as the basic source of innovation. The Information Revolution era began with the invention of the integrated circuit or computer chip, changing society on all levels. (Idea Works, 1995)  The information superhighway permitted people to communicate using computers all around the globe; fax machines, satellite dishes, and cellular phones have changed how families spend their time, the kind of work they do, and many other aspects of daily lives. Graphic tablet comes back to the scene of modern technology developments with the RAND tablet input device sold together with the DEC Workstations. (Carlson, 2005) This was a very expensive device, which would receive the magnetic signals and decode them as a set of coordinates to work with within a CAD system. (Wikipedia, 2009) In 1984, “Dr. David Thornburg [designs] a low-cost computer drawing tool for [general consumers], the Koala Pad and the bundled drawing program, KoalaPainter” (Wikipedia, 2009) for Apple II, Commodore 64 and Atari home computers.

It is clearly seen how the further development and simplification of a technology makes it available to the public. Throughout the ages, the impact that graphic tablet or its precedents had on the society varied from great, when it was a source of knowledge and information, to medium: when it affected and improved certain areas of social and personal aspects of lives. Graphic tablet has made a long way, evolving from a piece of rock with writings curved into it to a very sophisticated, state-of-art device, which is widely available to everyone.

References:

Carlson W.E. (2005, February 2.). (Ed.). An Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation. Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://sophia.javeriana.edu.co/~ochavarr/computer_graphics_history/historia/

Graphics Tablet, Wikipedia. (2009, March 11, 04:27.). Retrieved on March 15, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_tablet

Industrial Revolution. (2009). In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://search.eb.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/eb/article-9042370

KoalaPad, Wikipedia (2009, February 17, 11:41.). Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad/Painter

Sociology Timeline. (1995.). Idea Works, Inc. Retrieved March 15, from http://web.missouri.edu/~brente/timeline.htm

Stone Tablet, Wikipedia (2008, November 3, 21:36.). Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tablet

Telautograph, Wikipedia (2009, February 11, 14:05.). Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telautograph

Collective Wiki Reflection

Creating a collective Wiki turned out to be a fun exercise. Although, the need to keep it in a professional and academic form slowed down its development a little, but overall I would say it was a success. One of the downsides though, was a limit in time to complete the research. Having used scholarly approved sources prompted a careful choice of words and sentence structures, so that not much of an editing was required. Writing a research is always somewhat biased. Having to do this research on my own, I would choose different form and writing style. Breadth and depth would most likely depend on my own experience with the subject, or without such, the knowledge I would get from academic sources compared to not so academic sources. I would structure it differently, basing the research on examples, going from the greatest, like the Internet, to the smallest ones and discussing their differences and social aspects. The example that I would particularly pay more attention to would be the use of forums and collective blogs as a successful mean of crowd sourcing, based on personal experience. Having to work in a group and again, with the time limit, forced us to stick with the point format, which was pretty much simply answering the questions, without any additional or side information on the topic. Luckily we did not have any arguments and disagreements on the topic, otherwise, being in the same room and expressing different opinions could cause some troubles. Similar to the video example we saw in the lecture about Wiki on British Bombings, when the page was completely emptied by someone who disagreed or simply did not like it, we too, had a moment when a page was deleted while being edited.

Graphic Tablet in Contemporary Society

Graphics Tablet or a Digitized Tablet, as the Wikipedia suggests, is a computer input device used to control the graphics user interface in a similar way as the computer mouse does. Most types of graphics tablets consist of a flat surface that is able to capture and transmit signals provided by the stylus (a controller, in most cases a pen) when in contact with the surface of the tablet. Early versions of tablets were mainly used for the handwriting recognition, as the reflection of Marshall McLuhan’s predictions of a Paperless Society, allowing the transfer of a written text into the word processing program for editing it. (McLuhan, M., 1964)  The modern versions offer a much higher precision, pressure, tilt recognition, and can be used for a variety of purposes that include, but not limited to the creation of computer graphics (2D and 3D).

A study of digital ink in lecture presentation conducted at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems reviews the usage of a tablet, allowing the presenter to write down annotations on the projected slides. (Anderson, R. J.,   Hoyer, C., Wolfman S. A., Anderson R., 2004) This study discussed the analogy between the Digitized Ink and physical gestures, and its use to increase the attention to particular parts of the slides. The survey proved that 55% of audience reported their attention increased to the lecture, when only 10% reported their attention decreased. Further use of the Digital Inking systems has its social effect and proves itself useful in terms of education. Raising attention to the important parts of the lecture and at the same time making examples with ease, rather than letting out huge amounts of information, allows easier understanding of this information.

This definitely has a positive effect on the means of presentation. The ability to visually communicate with the audience, makes about any lecture more interesting, thus allowing a better perception of the information being presented. Being a university student myself, I find this to be a very interesting way to make examples on the lecture material, because there is no better way to learn as from examples.

As a plausible interchange for Digital Ink and graphics tablets in general, I can only think of the Microsoft Surface. It is a new interactive device, which allows users directly operate with digital objects on the tabletop. Although it carries a slightly different idea, it resembles a big touch screen tablet, which turns out to be the same thing. As for the implausible interchange, I have thought of the Visual Scrubbing Technology from a science fiction movie called The Minority Report. The main character, wearing special gloves, controls a 3D projected interface (a hologram) and scrolls through the video records looking for clues. Visually projected holograms still stay in the science fiction world, but the potential of operating a 3D object that does not yet exist, simply but touching it, without having to use any input devices is quite fascinating.

References.

Anderson, R. J.,   Hoyer, C., Wolfman S. A., Anderson R. (2004.). Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. A study of digital ink in lecture presentation, 567 – 574. Retieved on February 10, 2009, from http://doi.acm.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1145/985692.985764

Graphics Tablet, Wikipedia. (2009, January 31, 20:00.). Retrieved on February 08, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_tablet

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Taylor & Francis, 1987

Plagiarism Tutorial

Plagiarism Tutorial

Let the hallucination begin.

Hello there… 

First things first: to our Instructor and TA, please let me know when you check it over, so I could hide my name, don’t like spilling my real name all over the Internet. 

So my name is Serge.
I’m going into SIAT and I like anything and everything that is somehow linked to the graphic design. I draw and paint myself, although haven’t had much time lately, but meh… hopefully I’ll have some time sooner or later to reincarnate the creative side of my personality.
I like house/trance/celtic/ambient music and I also dance, have done ballroom for about 6 years. Funny thing is that I actually started dancing, probably just like any other guy, breakdance and then at some point radically shifted to waltz…
I’ve also done some historical fencing, and hoping someday to continue learning the way of the sword haha.
There are much more interesting (or possibly non-interesting) facts about me that I’m going to skip.

As for the favorite technology, it definately would be a graphic tablet. If I hadn’t learned about it, I could only imagine how misserible would my life of a graphic designer be! So YES I’m loving WACOM!

To be honest I don’t have a photo… well, actually I have plenty… BUT whehever there is a camera around I feel like doing something stupid… So this is the only “normal” photo i could find…