Bluetooth pen w/Inkwell ? :
<a href="http://www.anotofunctionality.com"; target="_blank">http://www.anotofunctionality.com</a>;
hmmmm......... sounds very interesting indeed! A bluetooth pen, write it on paper, and it translates into text [or leaves your handwriting the way it is] onto screen.......... :-)
hmmmm......... sounds very interesting indeed! A bluetooth pen, write it on paper, and it translates into text [or leaves your handwriting the way it is] onto screen.......... :-)
Comments
<strong><a href="http://www.anotofunctionality.com"; target="_blank">http://www.anotofunctionality.com</a>;
hmmmm......... sounds very interesting indeed! A bluetooth pen, write it on paper, and it translates into text [or leaves your handwriting the way it is] onto screen.......... :-)</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hope Apple has nothing to do with this. This pen sucks. You have to use special paper! You might as well just have a tablet. The idea is half-baked - and it was half-baked years ago when Ericsson demo'd it at CEBIT (or some other show).
If Apple wants to do something here, come up with something that doesn't need special paper to use it. I can't believe people think this is a good idea. Lame!
<strong>I hope Apple has nothing to do with this. This pen sucks. You have to use special paper!</strong><hr></blockquote>
Why do you need special paper? There should be enough positioning information in the pen itself for this to work. You just need really tiny accelerometers. Come to think of it, MEMS gyros and accelerometers are getting cheap enough that this could come together now. It's not easy by any means since you're describing your writing by dead-reckoning, but on the other hand, you get a lot more data to feed the software because you can capture the rotation and pivot of the pen.
Put a contact at the tip of the pen so you can drop it into a charging station.
Again, doable. Not too cheap though - $99 minimum. There are a lot of hardware devices that Apple could do: pen, DV camera, PVR, PDA, picture frame. Certainly they won't do all of them, so take your pick...
So? It's just a pad of paper with a pattern of dots printed on it. What's the big deal?
[quote] You might as well just have a tablet. <hr></blockquote>
Yeah, let's compare this to something that costs an order of magnitude greater than this pen & paper. How do you tear a note off your tablet and give it to someone? Don't say "beaming or networking to his tablet", either-- you can hand a piece of paper to anyone.
Personally, I hope Sony/Ericsson get this to work with OSX. There's nothing thay says there can only be one method of handwriting input...
[ 07-13-2002: Message edited by: Gamblor ]</p>
The paper has a pattern of dots printed on it that are basically encoded coordinates. No matter where you write on a sheet of paper with the pattern printed on it, the pen knows where you're writing. That'd be kinda difficult to do with the system you describe.
...And just because Apple implements something like Inkwell doesn't mean that they have to be the ones who implement hardware to use it.
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The paper has a pattern of dots printed on it that are basically encoded coordinates. No matter where you write on a sheet of paper with the pattern printed on it, the pen knows where you're writing. That'd be kinda difficult to do with the system you describe.
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Sure, but that's handwriting recognition through positioning in a set coordinate system.
It's like navigating a ship via GPS.
But that's not how you and I write. I can write perfectly well (maybe not in a straight line, grant you) by dead reckoning. I know how much up to move the pen, how much tilt, rotation, etc. By capturing all of these things you can develop a different set of algorithms for handwriting recognition.
Of course, you can't get this information from the paper, from a tablet, etc. You can only get it from the pen itself. A 4 coordinate accelerometer at each end of the pen would capture pretty much every physical aspect of the pens motion.
And this isn't rocket science either - they are actually <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/msrnews/smartquill.asp"; target="_blank">demonstrating</a> pens that do this (this prototype came out 4 years ago, BTW). They are big, and I think most of the previous developers got sidetracked in a few ways. Bluetooth should be able to transmit the data fast enough to get good resolution for recognition, and Apple would insist that the pen be small and stylish. It wouldn't need much on-board computation power as the Mac does all the hard processing. This is different than the one above that does the whole thing, has a screen, and then you beam your data to your PDA, etc. I'd offload the computation and do the display directly on the end device.
The tradeoff over a tablet is that it is a purely relative system. It's difficult to drive a UI using the pen since you have to set a fixed frame of reference. Something along the lines of the clone tool in Photoshop - you click a button and touch the desk, and all positioning is relative to that point.
For writing, you don't need this. You just write and you put the text where you need. You end up with a system a little bit more like the Palm with a positioning system and a writing system than the Newton where you just wrote where you wanted the text to do.
Seriously, it's pretty possible.
<strong>So? It's just a pad of paper with a pattern of dots printed on it. What's the big deal?
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The big deal is that it is a resource that you have to keep replacing. You have to buy that special paper, otherwise your pen is useless. As a general purpose tool, that isn't good enough. As a vertical market product it is fine.
If Apple come up with something that doesn't require special paper, then they have a winner. But while it requires special paper, the technology is a loser before it even gets out there.
I actually worked at Ericsson when they were developing that pen. It was obvious then that having special paper was going to be a pain in the arse. And it is. This is why home users won't want this pen.
this company makes a bluetooth pen that does not require special paper. read more at link above
<strong>UPDATE- <a href="http://www.otmtech.com/vpen.asp"; target="_blank">http://www.otmtech.com/vpen.asp</a>;
this company makes a bluetooth pen that does not require special paper. read more at link above</strong><hr></blockquote>
That thing's awesome