Drawing Tablets

I'm interested in drawing tablets and I wonder how that might appear in
browsers.

Typically drawing tablets have these properties:

- PenID: The current pen ID being used
- Tool type: the classification of the pen
- Proximity: in range of the magnet-resonance sensors
- Distance: distance over the surface
- X Position: absolute position from the left
- Y Position: absolute position from the top
- Z rotation: rotation of the pen around its axis (roll)
- Pressure: when the pen contacts the tablet surface, amount of pressure
excerted
- Tilt X: the tilting of the pen relative to the X axis of the tablet
- Tilt Y: the tilting of the pen relative to the Y axis of the tablet
- Wheel: the wheel on the pen mouse
- Throttle: the throttle lever on airbrush pens
- Pen buttons (stylus, stylus2)
- Tablet buttons (left, middle, right)
- Touch: touch sensitive slide bars on the tablet

The tablets do sport fairly good resolutions of 5080 LPI in the case of
Wacom Intuous tablets which translates to a precision of +- 0.02mm. If
mapped to a full HD monitors height of 1080 pixels it would correspond to
more than 5 steps inbetween each pixel.

It's therefore of paramount importance to be able to setup a desired
transform (in whatever fashion) when entering drawing mode rather than
mapping and clamping a pen to its mouse emulated cursor position (for
application of this principle please try out photoshop and related products
that support tablets).

Another aspect that might be troublesome is that drivers for these devices
typically deliver correlated events separately (such as X/Y axes events)
which would be unusable to an application that way (it would result in
drawing stairs). It's therefore important to correlate some individual
events before passing them on to the application.

More modern tablets do also support multiple simultaneous pens and some
also have multitouch support.

Is there any specification that would be suitable to serve these devices?

Received on Friday, 3 August 2012 01:33:00 UTC