Since the launch of the Tablet PC I’ve been thinking about the possibilty of quantifying the “calibration” of various Tablet PC digitizers. Ideally I’d like to use an XY table with a digitizing pen mounted on it to test the differences between each expected position and the location that the Tablet reports. I’d like to do this for each of the Tablet PCs, just to see what the accuracy is like.
I don’t have an XY positioning table, so this idea’s been on hold.
One permutation I’ve been tinkering with is a simple sampling app instead. In this case, the user carefully taps the pen across marks on the screen and the app reports back the error for each point–since with some pre-calibration it can somewhat tell where the points should be. Now this isn’t going to be highly precise–because it’ll be easy for the user to tilt the pen differently at each point or eyeball the position a little differently.
To help out, a piece of paper printed with the sample points that the user is expected to tap is employed. With the paper aligned over a grid displayed on the screen, hopefully this will help guide the user and remove some of the errors. Maybe I’ll need a pen holder in addition to this though to avoid too much tilt variation.
So far, I’ve just thrown together a test app. This weekend I hope to make it real and see if it works 🙂