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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.
Is 3 times as expensive as something as cheap as paper really that much of a problem for a new technology like this? Compared to most, this isn't so bad.
At the risk of sounding unsupportive of new technology, the description of this thing makes it sound a bit kludgy. It appears to basically be an optical-mouse element tracking a regular ballpoint pen.
Of course the ability to digitally record your penstrokes is super cool (and I wonder how much memory is in there? How long could I write before I had to dump it?), but requiring the digital paper to go along with it... well, that smacks of Gillette's approach to razorblades.
Initially, I thought it was going to be some kind of system for actually tracking the literal ball that does the writing. THAT would be neat; normal paper, normal ballpoint pen, and recorded to boot. Then again, I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad, so I wonder if there's a chance this would work on regular paper...
How does it handle erasing? Can you digitally white-out your mistakes before it is uploaded? It's a neat idea, but I don't see many people using it. The only thing worse than a paper trail is a digital trail.
Oh dear...
First, a poster of someone else's face (facial recognition evasion).
Second, the goey fingerprint duplicator,
now this walk-by signature hacker on a PDA?
What would be next?
Hijacking IRIS pattern (simply stareing at the bathroom mirror)?
Stolen DNA pattern?
There is no solid defense against unrevokable but stolen biometric parameters.
Actually, no. At least, you can't beat signature recognition devices that way. They look at presure changes, speed, and strokes, none of which are captured by this device.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
It's more likely calculating movements the same way an optical mouse is. Just storing direction and distance data by calculating the difference in pattern at a high sampling rate, so it should be able to store quite a lot of it.
Wonder if you could scan the paper in and print your own...
It's possible that the off-white colour is actually florescent or something and the pen might use a UV light source to track the movements.
Seems like the old inkjet / razorblades selling technique. Give them the technology (cheap?) then sell supplies. I won't buy-in to that type of technology.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I can certainly imagine ways of doing that that DON'T require digital paper.
Just out of curiosity, how else would you do it? You need to compensate for the fact that people pick up the pen and move to a different spot on the paper while they're writing/drawing. How would you deal with that without special paper.