An Accessible, Three-Axis Plotter for Enhancing Calligraphy Learning through Generated Motion

Abstract

Learning a motor skill is essential for many aspects of our lives. The complexity of some of these activities makes it hard for novices to understand through observation. Calligraphy writing is one such artistic practice where learners compare the visual differences between their writing and expert manuscripts and adjust until they have achieved similar results. We propose an accessible plotter-based system that guides the learner’s arm and hand in three directions with an actuated brush. It converts static Chinese calligraphy manuscripts to G-code that reproduces the calligrapher’s movement. Through a user study with twelve novice calligraphy learners, we validated the efficacy of our system as a learning tool that allows novices to gain an intuition of nuanced skills such as depth variation more effectively compared to watching a video recording of the same movement.