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'Cut and Paste' Is Out, 'Pick and Drop' Is In
Roland Piquepaille writes "How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it. Now, imagine yourself in a meeting, picking a file on your PDA with a digital pen and using the same pen to drop it on your friend's laptop screen. This is exactly what Jun Rekimoto and his team at Sony Interaction Laboratory have developed with their 'pick and drop' technique. BBC News looks at this project in Digital pen takes on mouse. Because it's based on cheap and existing components, such a system might be released in the near future, though Sony hasn't announced any plans to do it. You'll find more details and pictures in this overview."
This is a great step towards a more social use of computers. Instead of being bogged down with components and using hardware to move files around, it looks as though presenters will be able to quickly move through lectures or presentations without having to mess around. This seems much more seamless to me, and natural. Imagine gaming with the pick and drop scenario. I'm an amateur game designer and this is opening a whole new field of dreams for me... like maybe a better way to interract with film, in theatres, or the advent of much better interactive social gaming.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This sounds like what Tom Cruise was doing in Minority Report with those fancy computer gloves.
To me it just seems like another one of those novelty items. On the other hand, if they can get it to be as robust and enough mem like thumb drives, they could really take off.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
The question is, how long before 'pick and drop' is patented and no one else can use it without paying exhorbant liscencing fees.
What's sad about the above statement is it's not meant as humor.
A business card pre-encoded with the contact information for its owner would be cool. Hand someone your card, they touch it to their PDA and hand it back.
Other more permenant uses would also be cool, get train schedules (including changes due to repairs (Those in NYC know just how important that detail is) at the station with a quick touch.
paul reinheimer
I'm not going to give up on the usefulness of my Cue Cat just yet.
I don't know about your friends but I've got some real winners who just keep forwarding until the original info is nested 40 layers deep. argh!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
How long will you have to keep your "pen" connected for the data to be transfered. If you're going to have to hold your hand there for a while for bigger files you mind as well just use other methods of data transfer.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
see this slashdot article for insight, needless to say slashdot keeps feeding him while he steals other peoples content and reposts it as his own
I've just confined its use to nasal maintenance. Sometimes an added roll step is required between the pick and drop steps. It sounds like these guys have just taken this concept and run with it.
This thing'll be used to drop porn on the board room's projector during a meeting, a'la Fight Club, or will be used to write nasty things about the presenter, who would probably be facing the audience rather than the screen...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I suppose that someone should play devil's advocate and point out that this will revitalize the old "dirty disk" transmission vector for virus's and other malware. Where it use to be, "Don't put that disk in your PC, its got a virus on it", now it'll be "Don't touch me with that thing, its dirty!".
Subsequent invention of a small, slip-on firewall is pending...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I really like the idea behind this because it targets a specific audience that will really benefit from it: i.e. people who have to use computers to work, but don't want to know how they work.
Sure it won't be as efficient as cut + paste (won't work on remote machines for e.g.), or as powerful + customisable as a perl script, but for day-to-day needs of people who don't have or want a clue this may be a step further to making computers invisible (kinda like the taps and sinks and washing machines we're so used to when we want water)
How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
No. That's what the "attach" button is for. I've always found cut & paste into an email to be quite dodgy.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
What the hell is the difference? Seriously. Now instead of using programs already implemented and functioning, we'll have to carry around a little pen with some memory or bluetooth or some other technology built in? Thus slowing down bootup time, adding more drivers to deal with, and potentially more flaws? I love how the article says "this is very intuitive..." Shit guys, cut & paste is intuitive cuz we've been doing it the better part of 20 years, now you want to 'shift the paradigm' (TM).
Sony should have seriously sat back and said, "ya know, it isn't broken and it doesn't need to be made any better right now, we have better things to spend money on." But noooo, instead Joe Jackass VP said "Hyuk, I wanna touch my friends laptop and have my files automagically pop onto their computer."
And holy hacking batman, this is a whole new world of identity/property theft.
schild
editor, f13.net
Ah, for the days of sitting in Dad's lap, watching HeeHaw, admiring the cowgirls.
-Laz
What does this do that I can't do with cut&paste?
When i need something on another computer, it's always a file anyway, which I can put on my LAN (Like 1GB+). This just seems like a waste of time when we already have a simple way of doing it.
1) No, it will be a propietary atrac thing which will take five hours to convert an rtf doc into a protected atrac file before 'conveniently' dropping into your colleague's laptop
2) of course they will, it will be in the next upgrade plugin distribution for media player, but nobody using any of ten public serials will be allowed to use it
3) Yes, all ps3 and psps will be bundled with one of these pense. And,
4) No.
I also reply below your current threshold.
So now my stylus will be able to store data and copy it to another device? A "smart" pointer?
I read that as equating to $$$ when I lose the bloody thing.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
That would be cool!
No, typical interfaces used to exchange information are impractical or clumsy. Well designed interfaces are not. Back before my Palm died I used to use beam-it to exchange files with other palm owners using the IR link. While the user interface was far from optimal, it was far from being impractical or clumsy.
Setting up a "pen manager server" just so I can exchange files is impractical and clumsy.
Best quote in the BBM article:
Dr Russell Beale, of the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham in the UK, said it was "toys for the boys".
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I still like "Xerox and throw". . .
"When the pen tip comes close to the screen of another device, a shadow of the attached object appears on its screen. Tapping the pen tip instructs the 'pen manager' server to copy the file to that location." I can't tell if the pen actually is screen location sensitive, or if it just sends the file to the destination machine? In other words, is it actually a copy and paste across two computers, or is it just a clunky way to send files?
Will sony open source it?
Probably not
Will MS support it?
Eventually yes
Will they give these pens out for free?
No - did you get your computer for free?
Will anyone actually use it?
Yes
Any more inane questions?
Given the Sony approach to a device that has a unique ID that can be tracked through some kind of communication, I don't know why they don't simply take the opportunity to stuff the "pen" with the data. The demo talks about handheld to handheld, so it's not likely to be huge amounts.
In either case, the device is an intermediary, that could be built into anything most people have with them at all times. Cellphone, for example.
Check out the paper he submitted at CHI. Also the BBC has a story about this at this address.
In short, the pen doesn't actually store the file, but uses a third server to mark and notify which file should be copied to where...
Mac System 7 had "publish and subscribe", which was similar to this idea in the sense that it made a lot of sense, saved time, had a consistent metaphor, and was used by nobody.
RTFA. The stylus has an ID. From what I read, you touch a file with the stylus and your computer basically says "this file is about to be transferred with this stylus". When you touch another computer with it, that computer asks the network "I'm a computer looking for a file from this stylus" and the original responds by sending it. Old idea, new interface. I like it.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
I prefer copy and paste. That way I won't lose the original data if I happen to screw it up.
Several people posting seem to have the impression that this thing is like a USB thumb drive shaped like a pen. It is not a storage device, it is an interface metaphor. The actual data still has to move across a network. It is just a more fluid and intuitive (well fluid and intuitive is a matter of opinion) of telling the systems to transfer data. ie, instead of expilictly transfering the data from the PDA (via hotsync, ftp, nfs, whatever) the pen motion initiates an implicit transfer of data.
Why not fork?
Will some slashdroid ask if it plays Ogg Vorbis?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Back in '92 in a High School computer class after some serious concentrating on coding, I looked over to a friend's PC next to me, and instinctively tried to move my mouse cursor over to his PC to show him an error. At the time, I felt silly for doing that. In hindsight, my subconscious actions might have led to a similar innovation.
Now on a related note, I found that after hours of playing Castle Wolfenstein (back then), I had the urge to push on every brick wall I found to see if there was a hidden room behind it.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Most bluetooth or IrDA cellphones support swapping business cards using the same standard (vCard) as PDAs and other IrDA compatible devices use. I've used my cellphone at conferences to beam business cards to and from all sorts of handheld gadgets.
So why use the pen at all .... why not use biometrics ... maybe fingerprints .... grab (pinch) a file and move it to the other guys machine .... you would just have to make sure that your finger print is readable on each end.
Not only will MS support it, they'll attempt to patent it.
All Sony electronic products will only support Sony pens, and all non-Sony products will interoperate amongst themselves, but not with Sony devices.
This annoying situation will persist for at least a decade.
...then you would not have to worry about loosing the pen :-)
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
Oh great, now BB will setup scanners to see what's on all of our digital pens. /* :) it's Friday */
Halliburton -- "Everybody owns a share"
You only use 2% of your DNA
So basically an item is selected then xfered to a "pen server" with the unique ID of the pen that selected the item attached to the object. Then next time the pen interacts with a screen, the pen server gets polled and whatever resource is currently in there for that pen gets put up on screen.
Seems like a lot of extra infrastructure to me.
Why not just place a small memory card inside the pen? When the pen selects an object, that object is copied into the memory space of the pen.
Then you don't have to worry about servers or a wireless network infrastructure. You could use a simple bluetooth setup to communicate between pen and pda/laptop/or other device.
Plus you could have like a fixed-object or long-term object stored in the pen, such as a business card or other contact information.
The only hurdles would be providing power to the pen itself. It'd probably wind up about the size of a typical ball-point pen, rather than the slender size of today's typical styluses (styli?) for PDAs.
Certainly the static objects could be implemented using something similar to rfid where the object is hard-coded and the rfid signal is enough to retrieve the information.
Marf.
A number of posters seem to have missed the point on how it is implemented (not surprising because that is hard to find in the articles). The key concept seems to be some shared space such as a server. The BBC article says:
"The 'pick and drop' system was developed using the Mitsubishi Amity handheld pen computer and a Wacom PL300 pen-sensitive desktop screen.
Pens are given a unique ID, which is readable by the computer when the pen is close to its screen.
When a person taps on an icon with the pen, the computer contacts a 'pen manager' server, via a fixed or wireless connection, and the object is attached to the pen, although the pen itself has no storage capacity.
When the pen tip comes close to the screen of another device, a shadow of the attached object appears on its screen.
Tapping the pen tip instructs the 'pen manager' server to copy the file to that location."
You mean just like CDs did ...? Or perhaps you mean like nurofen (tradename for ibuprofen, granted it's more widespread since the patent lapsed, but it didn't die). Maybe, you mean that it will fade away like ring-pulls ...
Just because something is protected by a patent doesn't mean that it can't be licensed reasonably. Rewarding good, genuinely innovative, ideas is OK in my book.
Of course, this is quite clever as it uses hardware as well as software and so can more easily be patented in places that restrict software patents (which is still true in Europe, whatever the press says).
pbhj
(Pick It and Flick It)
I use Tokens to exchange any size files with my family and friends. So, I can e-mail a Token that contains a reference to some videos and pictures (the size of which easily exceeds the size of an e-mail attachment). The receiver can redeem the Token. No more fiddling with sending CDs through the mail with the latest pictures and videos of the kids. For more information or to try it out:
http://www.creo.com/tokens
So i want to send a file to a friend in say Canada:-
* Pick file up using pen
* Buy stamps and envelope
* Mail pen to friend
* fried puts on screen
What a fucked up system,
I'd have to say:
Sony will patent the device and charge substantial license fees to other manufacturers to make them.
Of course this will be pocket change to MS and they will pay the fees and embrace the technology. Look for MS to add "innovations" which only work when the pen is used on MS-based PDAs, cellphones and PCs. Microsoft will try to patent these so Sony and others cannot legally implemetn them.
No bloody way will the pens be given out for free. More than likely they "given away" with other hardware (probably Sony-only, but perhaps some other brands later) but the cost will really be built into the bundled price.
If Sony doesn't try to excessively hoarde the IP then it'll catch on--it's a really cool idea.
Sony does show some promise however--they have embraced Linux on the PS2 and more recent products so they have some interest in Free SOFTWARE. I'm quite confident that they'd fully cooperate in making such a device work with Linux.
The question remains however on what they think of Free HARDWARE (Free in the "libre" sense rather than "gratis"). You'd think they'd learn from the Betamax videotape format, however they have persisted to some degree in repeating the same mistakes. How widely deployed is their "memory stick" technology beyond their own products? Next to nonexistent compared to CF, SD/MMC, etc. Now they've invented yet another format for their PSP portable gaming/multimedia device.
The idea of requiring connectivity to a shared "pen manager server" and unique IDs on all pens, is so much more complex and messy than just sticking the data in flash inside the pen. Their solution is worse than this "mistaken assumption".
If I recall correctly, Timbuktu allowed me to do this in the 1990's
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...