N-Trig DuoSense – Wacom Killer?

Wacom – The 800 Pound Gorilla of Stylus Input

Every designer worth his or her salt is familiar with Wacom, the dominant player in the graphics tablet market. In my career. the vast majority of designers that use a tablet use a Wacom from the Intuos or (now discontinued) Graphire lines. I myself have had my trusty Wacom Intuos2 6×8 for years. In fact, I’m such a devoted Wacom user that I use it as my primary means of interaction with my computer. Forget Photoshop and Illustrator, I even use my Intuos2 in Firefox and Finder. I have to make a conscious effort to put the Wacom pen down and switch to my mouse (a Logitech VX Nano, best general purpose mouse ever) for applications like Ableton Live that aren’t tablet-friendly. I’m not alone, either: Wacom launched PenCollective, a promotional site dedicated to the rabid fandom Wacom users tend to develop.

However, as much as I love my good old Intuos2, if I had my druthers I’d use a Cintiq 21UX which is an integrated pressure-sensitive tablet and 21 inch LCD monitor. Doing fine-detail retouching or painterly artmaking directly on the image instead of a separate tablet is a tremendous pleasure. However, at $1999 (compared to $329 for an Intuos3 6×8), it certainly is an expensive luxury.

N-Trig – Poised to Usurp the Throne?

Enter a young company called N-Trig, who created an ultra-thin pen and touch overlay for existing monitors and laptops. While stylus overlays and touch overlays have existed for years, they have never achieved mainstream popularity with design professionals because of Wacom’s strong presence in the market. However, N-Trig may be poised to change all that. Their technology, called DuoSense, supports not only pen and touch interaction but multi-touch interaction as well. N-Trig DuoSense is now being incorporated into Tablet PCs available today including the Dell Latitude XT.

So, we’ve got integrated pen and multi-touch in the hardware now, no overlays required! Great! Now how about the software? Well, it’s hardly news now that Windows XP and Vista natively support pen interaction. By now it’s hardly news that the next version of Windows, currently called simply ‘Windows 7′ will feature native multi-touch support as well. In fact, the video shown below demonstrates multi-touch in Windows 7 on a DuoSense-powered Dell Latitude XT. It seems like everything is coming together for N-Trig.

Any good news for OS X afficionados? Well, there are more than a few rumors floating around that Apple is negotiating with N-Trig to incorporate DuoSense into future Apple machines (MacBook Touch, anyone?).

Wacom Will Retain Their Core Market

So how is Wacom going to survive this attack on their near-monopoly? Well, there are a few advantages Wacom retains over N-Trig.

First and foremost, DuoSense is not nearly as pressure-sensitive as a Wacom tablet. Professional Wacom tablets (meaning everything except the Graphire and Bamboo lines) feature 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity compared with 256 levels of pressure sensitivity in DuoSense.

The second tremendous market advantage is that professional Wacom tablets are sensitive to the tilt of the pen and even its barrel rotation (with the 6D Art Pen), not just its coordinates and pressure. Ask any illustrator who uses Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or Corel Painter X in a painterly manner about how they get naturalistic stroke variation in their work and they’ll tell you it’s in the tilt or rotation.

One last advantage for Wacom is that their devices recognize distinct inputs – Wacom makes an airbrush that adds fingerwheel pressure and position to the types of inputs you can use in your work. Additionally, their tablets recognize different pens independently, even of the same model, so you have have two different pens set to different brushes or colors, allowing you to switch between them in a naturalistic manner

So, unless N-Trig starts exploring ways to incorporate Wacom’s trade advantages into DuoSense, I really don’t see Wacom in any danger of falling off the map. The entry-level Bamboo line of tablets may become obsolete, though. Oh well. Real artists don’t use Graphire or Bamboo tablets, anyway.

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