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Anoto-based Pens From Logitech
flanksteak writes "Logitech has announced the IO Pen, a ball-point pen with a memory. You write stuff with the pen, then drop it in its USB cradle and your bad handwriting appears on your PC. The pen is to be released in November. How cool would this be with support for a wireless protocol?" We've run some previous stories about this - no telling how well it actually works until it's tested, though. And at $9.99/notebook, the paper is about three times as expensive as regular paper.
It's not really a pen, per se, since you cannot use it with regular paper. What good is the pen, since it can only be used with the special digital paper?
"How cool would this be with support for a wireless protocol?"
A TPEN), pretty darn cool.
Well, seeing as how Sony Ericsson have already announced a pen using this technology that supports Bluetooth (http://www.expansys.com/product.asp?code=ERIC_CH
- Digital paper with Anoto functionality is created by printing a proprietary pattern of very small dots on ordinary paper that is perceived by the eye as a slightly off-white color. The dots have a nominal spacing of 0.3 mm (0.01 inch).
So my first question is: how much writing can it store if it's constantly taking pictures?As you write, the built-in digital camera in the pen continuously takes pictures of the patterned paper. Then, when you place the pen in its cradle, all of your writing is transferred automatically to your PC.
Unless you loan the pen to someone who has the special paper, that won't work.
Anoto uses paper with grey dots on it, aligned in a grid, that (for some reason or another) is part of a larger 60,000,000-sq-km unique grid (so no two pieces of paper are the same). The 'pen' has a camera in it, that captures the grey dots as you write, and stores the coordinates. This must use very little memory, but does force you to use more expensive (and likely harder-to-find) paper.
Still, I've preordered mine at amazon.com for $199. It's supposed to be available Nov 8.
I can certainly imagine ways of doing that that DON'T require digital paper. Either this was the easiest way to implement it (unlikely) or they saw that the real margins for this market are in selling digital paper on an ongoing basis (much more likely).
That is according to Logitech.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
I tried this thing at a conference in Miami about six weeks ago. Basically, it uses a compass to measure the tilt/direction of the pen and a capsule of fluid to tell when the pen is in motion. It stores text as bitmap, so you have to either a) write clearly and use OCS (blah), b) train the provided software in your handwriting style (a la palm), or c) deal with bitmaps (which isn't so bad if it's just for archival purposes).
Of course, it's still a regular pen so it's not like you HAVE to get the character recognition to work.
I have tested the Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Pen paired with their T68i GSM phone. I was evaluating it for a possible global industrial applicaiton.
I must say that while the concept is great, the technology isn't "there" yet. During my test, I had various tracking problems when filling out a digital paper form.
Also, if a form was successfully filled out, the handwriting resolution was very dim. The image quality was acceptable if the form was filled out in big, bold, and neat manuscript letters.
This might be acceptable for some applications, but daily, our millions of customers have millions of writing styles.
There simply wasn't a way to increase the resolution for productive use with our proprietary industrial OCR engine.
I'm going to keep up with the technology and wait for improvements in this area. The concept is fantastic and I expect the technology will be more refined within a year or so.
The word you are looking for is voila. A viola is a musical instrument, and thus doesn't make sense as an interjection.
The deal with the paper is that the pattern of dots is unique and no- repeating up to a area about the size of the North America. The business plan behind Annoto is to license sections of that mapspace to companys.
Catalog company X could license 100 sq ft for use in their catalogs - using 2mm at a time for a check box next to each item in their catalog. When you check the box, the pen records those cordinates, when you download the map locations trigger an order form to be filled out on the company's catalog web site. Or 3M could sell POST-IT Faxes - a post-it with a check box to fax, so that when you link your pen with the internet , the message you just scribbled is faxed away.
My only concern with the company is the Cue-Cat esque business model of makeing people have to pass their informtion through the annoto servers to perform anything useful.
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
I would much rather have the old trackpad pen recording system... I can use any paper I desire, and just use the magnetic pen over the thin backplane that my paper is on... easier, better and costs less than the overprices $200 + another $200 a month in special paper.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
up to 40 pages at a time
(from this page
is every page in the special notebook unique? And is each NOTEBOOK unique?
Yes. Here's a Wired story about the guys who invented the paper.
"But worst of all, the software that decodes it REQUIRES the .NET framework to run -- so much for Linux!"
.NET framework?
This
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I think I will still prefer the InkLink, especially since it clips to any pad of paper, not require special digital paper. It is also only $100 vs. $200 for the io pen (SmartPad: $100, SmartPad2: $150) and works with PC(windows they should say), Palm, and PocketPC
here is the company info about it
I got it to take class notes and it works great. The only bad thing is having to re-position the clip after you write on each page...
Gerry -- #include "ea!.h"
JESUS H. CHRIST. If I see one more comment like this modded as +5 I'm going to cry!
The paper *IS* the technology development in this case. If you don't understand that, please look at their site again!
If you would just think about how this could possibly work for a second, you'd realize that.
Imagine a pen that works your way -- like an optical mouse that tracks movement. Write a long letter out by hand, and upload it to your computer. How would you expect it to look? If you said "just like my letter," you're wrong! With your 'optical mouse' technology, you'd get (if you're lucky) one long sentence.
The special paper is what allows this thing to know WHERE the pen tip is at at all times. You could draw a circle in the upper right corner, draw a square in the lower left corner, then go back and draw an X in the circle. Then flip a page in the notebook and write a letter. Then go back to page one and draw some more objects.
Now stick the pen in the USB device, download it, and you'll see two separate pages, just exactly as you drew them.
And this is only scratching the surface... no pun intended.
"And like that
At least it works with any old piece of paper.
Sure, you gotta put the paper on the tablet, but that's not a big deal. The pen is also properly sized for human hands. I've always wanted to try to hack the proprietary data format and get it to sync to my palm phone. I didn't like the newer unit designed for palms (different manufacturer ?) because it was too small. The only changes the Crosspad would need to stay current is USB 2 or firewire downloads and a decent pen cap with a stylus tip.
How does it handle erasing?
It doesn't. That's why they chose a ball-point pen instead of a pencil. As with an ordinary pen, erasing is accomplished by scribbling out what isn't wanted.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
This is an old concept. A friend of mine had this same idea years ago in Grad School. We were creating strategic techhology concepts and his digital pen was The JOT! Check it out: annoia.com. Go in, click on The Jot movie...
Get rid of the expensive paper! Make it do a few other things that might actually make my life easier! Then I'll spend the money.
I suppose that you haven't heard about a little thing called the Mono project The point of .net is to allow applications to work anywhere. IE. Windows, MacOS, SmartPhones, and yes, Linux. We should waste less time hating everything Microsoft puts out and spend more time realizing that it may be possible to get along.
redune.com: The World 3.2 Megapixels at a time
I can also think of a number of technologies for this particular situation as well. Silicon accelerameters could easily be used to detect movement side to side. Coupled with a simple tip switch (e.g., am I pushing on paper or not) this could kick in to determine amount of movement.
Again, there *are* solutions for this type of problem that does not include *paper with dots on it*. Quite frankly, that is simply not acceptable because in order for the pen to be useable you have to have the paper.
Consider the death of optical mice that require the special pads with dots in them.
Note that companies have produced similar technology for tablets.... such as Wacom. Their pen is totally passive (e.g., no power other than that radiated from the tablet) - yet it senses up/down/tilt/rotation as well as pressure and stroke. Now before you go off the deep end, yes, I understand how the WACOM technology works (I used to write drivers for them) and yes, it is not the same... but a similar mechanism can be created for a pen device that I believe would work well enough to be useful and not require a special pad or special paper.
In fact, just considering wacom technology - what would be the difference if you merely used the pen to write on a "clipboard". There are already those types of devices out there - they require no *special paper*. I'd prefer that to special paper because it would let me use just about ANY paper - as long as I was writing things down on the *clipboard*. Again, these devices already exist.
I don't think it's a far jump to getting rid of the paper and the clip board. Hmmmmm, to bad GPS resolution isn't enough to track the hand movement.