Effect of Visual Cues on Line Drawing Performance

This paper investigates how visual cues affect human performance at a line drawing task. Line drawing is a primitive and fundamental task using tools such as pens, (soldering) irons, and cutters. Many situations (for example, home, office, studio, and workshop) require drawing lines with tools. Assistive tools for improving performance might be especially useful for unskilled people. As a first step, we focus on visual cues as assistive tools and determine the kinds of visual cues that are effective for good performance. We asked subjects to draw a line on a displayed dotted line while the spacing and shape of the dots is changed, and we then analyzed the data. The results indicate that the cue that should be displayed for good performance should change according to subjects' performance: for good performers the cue whose geometrical center is easy to detect, and for not-good performers the cues whose occupied area is large. We also discussed the possibility of controlling performance in line drawing, and presented a strategy for displaying visual cues for good line drawing performance.