High-performance pen + touch modality interactions: a real-time strategy game eSports context

We used the situated context of real-time strategy (RTS) games to address the design and evaluation of new pen + touch interaction techniques. RTS play is a popular genre of Electronic Sports (eSports), games played and spectated at an extremely high level. Interaction techniques are critical for eSports players, because they so directly impact performance. Through this process, new techniques and implications for pen + touch and bi-manual interaction emerged. We enhance non-dominant hand (NDH) interaction with edge-constrained affordances, anchored to physical features of interactive sur- faces, effectively increasing target width. We develop bi-manual overloading, an approach to reduce the total number of occurrences of NDH retargeting. The novel isosceles lasso select technique facilitates selection of complex object subsets. Pen-in-hand interaction, dominant hand touch interaction performed with the pen stowed in the palm, also emerged as an efficient and expressive interaction paradigm.