Artificial intelligence that is responsive to the human touch is believed to be an important advance in intuitive HMI. Wacom has added a new touch-responsive feature to its pen input-responsive Bamboo tablets. Five new tablets incorporating touch-only, pen-only and having a combination of both have been added to the Bamboo line. They are the Bamboo Pen, Bamboo Touch, Bamboo Pen and Touch, Bamboo Fun and Bamboo Craft.
The Pen is useful for applications that need precision like sketching or painting. It comes equipped with Corel Painter Essentials and two buttons functioning with the Wacom Tablet Driver program. Bamboo Touch is sold with instructions on touch gestures and can be plugged into a PC with the attached USB cable. The aforementioned devices are pen-only and touch-only tablets, respectively.
“Multi-Touch provides a very natural and intuitive way for users to navigate and interact with applications,” remarked Dennis Hoff, senior consumer product manager for Wacom. “By combining Multi-Touch with our renowned pen technology, Bamboo provides users with a new computer input approach that is not only extremely flexible, but friendly, fresh and fun. Multi-Touch and pen input are highly complementary input methodologies, each providing distinct benefits to the overall creative experience. We live in a world where people demand immediate and direct interaction during computer sessions, making that interaction as natural and easy as possible is Bamboo’s raison d’être.â€
The Pen and Touch, true to its name, can be operated with the pen or touch gestures. Users can easily switch between the two input types with the automatic deactivation capability of the device which switches off touch input when the pen contacts the tablet and vice versa. Software included in this package is Adobe Photoshop Elements as well as Nik filters.
The silver-bodied Fun allows pen and touch inputs. It is endowed with Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials as also Nik filters.Bamboo Craft accepts the same pen and finger-input controls as Fun. The software input comprises Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essential, Nik filters. Thrown in are additional freebies like a year-long subscription to Scrapbooking, an album by Shutterfly, 26 digital scrapbooking lessons and more.
The pen input technology is pressure sensitized, battery free and cordless. It comes with a digital eraser. Multi-Touch technology gives users the option of panning, zooming, scrolling, rotating and so on. These tablets support Windows 7, XP, Vista as well as Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5.
The Touch and Pen tablets retail at $69 each (approx. Rs.3,316), the Pen and Touch at $99 (approx. Rs.4,758), the Fun at $199 (approx. Rs.9,564), and lastly, the Craft at $129 (approx. Rs.6,199).
