I can think of few "features" I would like less.

I used to own a Gyration mouse which would allow you to move a cursor by waving the mouse around in the air. It sounded like a good idea for presentations. In practice it was almost impossible to use except as a very expensive laser pointer because you had no accuracy.

Hover gestures would seem to fail for the same reason. There is nothing that I could do while hovering that I couldn't do better with the pen in contact with the screen. A much better idea is the use of the "right click" such that holding down the button while making a gesture on the screen is interpreted differently than normal ink. StrokeIt (http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/) uses this approach very effectively.

The only thing that it might be useful for is as a virtual magnifying glass or as a tool for moving the screen window when using a screen resolution that is larger than the display.

This is a great tool we've been waiting for. Before we could only use these tools in Inkseine. With an independent feature, this could possibly also be applied to Onenote, without the need of having to run two apps simultaneously.

I think this is a good step in an increasing effort to finally combine functions into one packet.

Need I say more.

I like the concept, but I worry about a couple of things. First, although I can see that you have thought about how to keep from accidentally triggering a gesture menu,I wonder if I wouldn't accidentally make the gestures without meaning to. I move my pen around in the air a lot when I am thinking, mind mapping, etc. Especially in a sort of spiral motion. I would want to be able to customize the gestures so that they weren't the same as natural movements I make with the pen in the air. Second, will I remember the correct gestures? How hard will it be to access gesture help?

I would love to play with this. I think it looks promising.

I read this paper a while ago and loved the idea of using the digitizer's tracking state into a control layer. However, I don't know if this is a very useful application for a couple reasons.

1) The alternative way to distinguish normal pen movement from pen controls is holding the right click button. The paper states that this might be un-wieldly, or there might be no right click button, but reality tells us that almost every pen has a button and it's not hard to press.

2) The solution goes a long way to making the pen very useful, but as soon as you take it away you're unable to perform any of these functions with your fingers.

Any new user interface we implement from here on out should be usable by pen and and touch, because devices are going to be pen and touch, and users will expect the same interface wether they're using their finger or a pen. If we give them distinct ways to interact with each input method they might opt to use neither.

Thanks for the thoughs about this all around, folks! We were trying to push the concept to the maximum here for the sake of researching the idea, so I wouldn't necessarily advocate having the whole UI for an application based around hover gestures, but they do seem to be useful for certain things. Activating the circular scrolling gesture is one we are looking into some more.

Also, don't necessarily think of these competing with right-click; it would be an alternative way to get additional functionality in addition to right click. I also must say that studies we have done show that pen buttons leave a lot to be desired. They are kind of slow to press and error prone as well. Yet, they are there and for many people offer a better option than tap-and-hold, so all us tableteers still use them and make due with them.

Finally, regarding the comments on touch, it is true that a limitation of this approach is that it can't work for touch devices with no "tracking" state for the cursor. So, it would be something appropriate for handy shortcuts on Tablet PC's, but there would have to be alternative ways to get that functionality (e.g., you can imagine that in InkSeine there might be a hover gesture to turn on the circle-to-scroll feature over any window, but if you were on a device without hover, you could still activate it the way it works now in InkSeine, by circling on the Tool Ring's scroller.)