Patent Application
20140049479
When drawing or writing on a paper using a medium such as ink, paint, charcoal or chalk, a line can be “smudged” if a finger or palm of a person is dragged across it. This may be done intentionally, such as by an artist desiring to produce special drawing effects, or un-intentionally.
Electronic drawing applications have attempted to replicate this effect by providing a ‘smudge tool’. A smudge tool causes the appearance of a smudge to be rendered that follows the motion of an input device, such as an active stylus. Thus a smudge tool may replicate a person moving an ink-covered finger over a sheet of paper, but not replicate smudging a line previously drawn on the paper. A smudge tool may additionally be used with images, such as photographs. While similar to the first approach, the color of the rendered smudge is determined by the color of the image where the stylus first contacts the image. Neither of these approaches satisfactorily simulates the smudging of a line since both require a ‘smudge tool’ to be selected and neither allows smudging when a line drawing tool is selected.
It would be useful to provide a way to simulate line smudging in an electronic drawing application that does not require the use of a special smudge tool.
Exemplary embodiments of the disclosure will be described below with reference to the included drawings such that like reference numerals refer to like elements and in which:
For simplicity and clarity of illustration, reference numerals may be repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements. Numerous details are set forth to provide an understanding of the illustrative embodiments described herein. The embodiments may be practiced without these details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, and components have not been described in detail to avoid obscuring the disclosed embodiments. The description is not to be considered as limited to the scope of the embodiments shown and described herein.
When drawing or writing on a paper using a medium such as ink, paint, charcoal or chalk, a line can be “smudged” if a finger or palm of a person is dragged across it. This may be done intentionally, such as by an artist desiring to produce special affect in their drawing, or un-intentionally. For ink and paint, a line is capable of being smudged for only a few seconds or minutes after it is drawn, while the ink or paint is still wet. However, the line cannot be smudged once the medium has dried.
In accordance with certain aspects of the disclosure, a ‘smudge’ feature is provided in an electronic drawing application. The smudge features enables lines, rendered on a display screen of an electronic device in response to motion of an active stylus, to appear to be smudged by a finger or palm of a user. In one embodiment, for a period of time after line is rendered on the screen by the active stylus, a finger or palm movement on any portion of the line will result in the rendered line being replaced by a rendering of a smudged line. Once a set period time has elapsed since the original line was rendered, running a finger or palm over the line will have no effect. In this way, the effect of ink or paint drying may be replicated in the drawing application.
This feature enables artists to create special effects using smudging as they would on normal paper or canvas and also give users a feeling of writing on “real paper”.
In certain exemplary embodiments, the drying time, after which a rendered line cannot be smudged, may be varied providing a meaningful way of dealing with different media that have different drying times. Thus, ink may be simulated to dry faster than paint. Chalk and charcoal may be capable of being smudged indefinitely.
In other exemplary embodiments, the smudging feature may be turned on or off by the user.
In still other exemplary embodiments, the smudging effect may be reversible by the user.
In operation, the touch screen 108 of the electronic device 110 senses one or more touch positions at which a pointing device, such as a stylus 102 or a finger of a user 104, touches, or almost touches, the touch screen 108. When used for drawing or writing, the palm 112 of the user may touch the touch screen 108. The touch of the palm 112 may not be intended as input to the electronic device. When the stylus 102 is an active stylus, the touch position 114 of the stylus may be differentiated from the touch position of the palm 112 of the user.
In accordance with a first aspect of the disclosure, if a trajectory of a touch position other than the stylus position (such as the touch position of palm 112) intersects with a recently drawn line (such as line 116), the rendering of the line is replaced by an image 118 resembling a smudged line. This is illustrated in more detail in
In the example shown in
In operation, the graphics module 306, under control of a drawing application executed on processor 308, responds to motion of the stylus in a first region (sensed by stylus input module 304) and renders an image of a line on the display screen 108 in the first region of the display screen. At the same time, touch input (sensed by touch input module 302) is monitored. If touch input is detected in the first region, the image of the line is replaced with an image of a smudged line. The smudged line image is dependent upon the path of the user touch.
The electronic device 110 also includes a timing module 310 that is used to determine the time at which a stylus position is detected. The time and corresponding line parameters are stored in a database in memory 312. The line parameters may be stylus position coordinates, position identifier, line attributes (width, color, etc) and/or an identifier of an adjacent position. In one illustrative embodiment, when a touch input is detected in a region, the database in memory 312 is searched to find line segments that (i) where drawn within a specified time period of the detected touch input and (ii) intersect with the region of the touch. If the elapsed time between when a line was drawn when a touch input is detected in the same region is less than a set time, the line segment is replaced with a smudged line segment. The set time may mimic the drying time of ink or paint, for example. The image of the line is only replaced with the image of the smudged line if the user touch is detected in the first region while the elapsed time is less than a set time.
The properties of smudged line (such as the color) are selected dependent upon the properties of the intersected line. The position and extent of the smudge may be determined from the trajectory or path of the touch input.
Electronic device 110 may also include one or more peripheral devices 314, such as user inputs (mouse, keyboard, microphone, camera, switches, etc.), transceivers for wireless communication with a network or other electronic devices, ports for wired communication with a network or other electronic devices.
The processor 308 and/or graphics module 306 may be controlled by software instructions stored on a computer readable medium, such as memory 312. The drawing application may be executed on the processor 308, or on a remote processor in communication with the electronic device 110 via a network.
For the embodiment shown in
The implementations of the disclosure described above are intended to be merely exemplary. It will be appreciated by those of skill in the art that alterations, modifications and variations to the illustrative embodiments disclosed herein may be made without departing from the scope of the disclosure. Moreover, selected features from one or more of the above-described embodiments may be combined to create alternative embodiments not explicitly shown and described herein.
It will be appreciated that any module or component disclosed herein that executes instructions may include or otherwise have access to non-transient and tangible computer readable media such as storage media, computer storage media, or data storage devices (removable or non-removable) such as, for example, magnetic disks, optical disks, or tape data storage. Computer storage media may include volatile and non-volatile, removable and non-removable media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information, such as computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules, or other data. Examples of computer storage media include RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other memory technology, CD-ROM, digital versatile disks (DVD) or other optical storage, magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, or any other medium which can be used to store the desired information and which can be accessed by an application, module, or both. Any such computer storage media may be part of the server, any component of or related to the network, backend, etc., or accessible or connectable thereto. Any application or module herein described may be implemented using computer readable/executable instructions that may be stored or otherwise held by such computer readable media.
The implementations of the disclosure described above are intended to be merely exemplary. It will be appreciated by those of skill in the art that alterations, modifications and variations to the illustrative embodiments disclosed herein may be made without departing from the scope of the disclosure. Moreover, selected features from one or more of the above-described embodiments may be combined to create alternative embodiments not explicitly shown and described herein.
The disclosure may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from its spirit or essential characteristics. The described exemplary embodiments are to be considered in all respects only as illustrative and not restrictive. The scope of the disclosure is, therefore, indicated by the appended claims rather than by the foregoing description. All changes that come within the meaning and range of equivalency of the claims are to be embraced within their scope.
