December 17, 2001

12:14 PM

Anoto - wireless handwriting.it might turn out to be not that popular this christmas, but the anonto pen has the potential to become a big hit in 2002. just imagine you would never have to use your palm again. or imagine you lose your palm... and you really don't take. because the magic is in the pen!
posted by HeikoH (23 comments total)

after years working in front of a keyboard handwriting is getting harder for me. AND a pen is easier to loose.
posted by papalotl at 12:34 PM on December 17, 2001

That is incredibly interesting... of course I'll have to read more than just 3 or 4 pages before I make much more of it than that.

Thanks, HeikoH.
posted by silusGROK at 12:45 PM on December 17, 2001

Here's a ZDNet article on the pen. Too bad it seems not too many will be sold in the U.S. next year.
posted by samsara at 1:08 PM on December 17, 2001

Perhaps someone can post a summary because Anoto's web site is one of those "exploratory designs" where they don't want to give you the information up-front.

You don't realize how important pyramid-style writing and a focused message are until you see crap sites like this one. If I can't access the details I'm interested in after 60 seconds of looking, forget about it. Too bad because I think I want one of these devices if it does what I think it does and has the features I think it has.
posted by fleener at 1:10 PM on December 17, 2001

You have to print special paper and carry this paper with you, as well as this pen. Thanks, but I'll just slip my PDA in my pocket.
posted by benjh at 1:11 PM on December 17, 2001

hey, i was just reading an economist article on these! i like the Vpen :)

OTM Technologies hopes to use its V-Pen tracking technology to form the basis of a series of products made by partners rather than itself. The company's chief executive, Gilad Lederer, says the technology—called “optical translation measurement”—is based on a classic Michelson interferometer developed in the 1880s to detect the mysterious “universal ether” that scientists then believed to be the carrier of light waves. With a minute interferometer placed close to its writing tip, the V-Pen is sensitive enough to analyse the Doppler shifts (ie, changes caused by movement) in the wavelengths of light reflected from the writing surface as the pen sweeps across. These frequency shifts betray the movement of the nib as it scratches its way across a surface (even the back of a hand), allowing the pen's software to recognise the letters being formed and turn them into a stream of digital information.
posted by kliuless at 1:12 PM on December 17, 2001

Hmph. It requires special paper. So it's not just having the pen around, you have to have the paper, too. And it talks to a computer, which has to be up and operating correctly. Hmmm...

And so far as I know, Bluetooth doesn't exactly have all the bugs worked out of it...?

Sorry to be the wet blanket, but forgive me if I'm not quite ready to toss my palm out just yet.
posted by UncleFes at 1:13 PM on December 17, 2001

Gah! darn it benjh, you out-wet-blanketed me!
posted by UncleFes at 1:14 PM on December 17, 2001

Anoto builds a small camera near the tip of a standard pen. The camera can recognize billions of unique dot-patterns that can be printed on standard stock paper. It then transmits the movement of the pen (from each unique dot cluster to another) to another device like a PDA, phone or PC.

Problems: non-standard pen, the paper has to be special Anoto paper (altho they got deals with major paper manufacturers). Worse, the application has to transfer well to the paper interface.

That last one is the killer for me: We have moved on in our business processes from the paper interface. This thing could own a niche, but it won't kick the PDAs or smartphones out of theirs...
posted by costas at 1:15 PM on December 17, 2001

...if OTM can pull it off, I like their approach better. Anoto, as others have pointed out, requires that you buy special paper. That paper translates into certain advantages (like checkboxes that mean something to the pen) but it strikes me as being a cost problem.

Plus there is a mathematically limited amount of "paper space" in the Anoto universe, which they're farming out to partners based on payments (more money equals more paper you're allowed to print). Seems like a gouging opportunity for me, never mind the possibilities of running out of "paper space".
posted by aramaic at 1:18 PM on December 17, 2001

I win :) even if i did mess up the link to begin with..
posted by zeoslap at 1:27 PM on December 17, 2001

Anyone remember the early optical computer mouse, where the mousepad was dotted (the same way trackballs still are). Now paper isn't the most varied surface but could a high-resolution camera pick up enough defects to detect motion?

When writing on a whiteboard with a pen I feel like I'm going to pop. The words just aren't getting out fast enough and I'm not used to pacing myself. I don't want to go back to pens for anything more than a post-it. For text I don't see the market.
posted by holloway at 1:28 PM on December 17, 2001

Trackballs are dotted?
posted by sudama at 1:34 PM on December 17, 2001

Well imagine a newspaper covered in Anoto dots, you look over the classifieds and circle something, that something ends up in your todo box. I'm sure there are cooler examples but you get the picture.

and yes my optical trackball is spotted, awesome piece of kit.
posted by zeoslap at 1:35 PM on December 17, 2001

Several of the pens noted won't need special paper (V-pen and Digital Ink, as Kliuless noted), and at least one of them is designed to be used in conjunction with your pda.

Would you buy a $100 dollar replacement for your stylus if it a) worked with your PDA the way your current stylus does b) also drew permanent marks on paper and c) digitized everything you wrote on paper into your pa(Incuding text recognition)?

Doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me... I'm never going to use a PDA for note taking, too damn slow. But if I could take notes on paper then review them on PDA later (or PC) that'd be very cool. It'd be even cooler if I could use my stylus on paper (or any surface) without marking it up (no ink), then I could take notes on desktops...
posted by daver at 1:50 PM on December 17, 2001

Well imagine a newspaper covered in Anoto dots, you look over the classifieds and circle something, that something ends up in your todo box. I'm sure there are cooler examples but you get the picture.

Wasn't that sort of the basic idea of the CueCat? We all know how badly that tanked -- hopefully they'd come up with better applications than that for Anato.

Me too on the pooh-pooh. This just won't fly with enough people. Too impractical.
posted by me3dia at 2:01 PM on December 17, 2001

I would kill to be able to write on any surface, circle it and add a predefined glyph, and have it end up (via my cell phone) in my scheduler/address book/to do list etc etc. This will probably be possible within a year or so. Sweet.
posted by lbergstr at 2:13 PM on December 17, 2001

I'm with daver. The PDA's and these pens' functions are oblique to each other though there is some overlap. These pens are not meant to store your addresses and appointments and so on, for example. Beyond that, requiring special paper sucks big time.

This reminded me of the SmartQuill idea from British Telecom whose only purpose is to record handwriting. Something like that makes a lot of sense to me. Not just the OCR but the fact that you are making a backup of your notes is really useful.
posted by mmarcos at 2:51 PM on December 17, 2001

The CueCat idea was ridiculous but different: people would scan a barcode in an ad with a device attached to their desktop computer. The scanning process would bring up a web page with information or to order or whatever. It was hit with hackers.

Now I'm reminded of the Sony device that would capture what song was being played on the radio... I forget, anybody remember? I think it was... decommissioned.
posted by mmarcos at 2:56 PM on December 17, 2001

Plus there is a mathematically limited amount of "paper space" in the Anoto universe, which they're farming out to partners based on payments (more money equals more paper you're allowed to print). Seems like a gouging opportunity for me, never mind the possibilities of running out of "paper space".

According to a Wired piece on the Anoto pen I read a while back, the amount of "dot space" is really huge (although finite). Having something like a Filofax or Dayplanner that automatically transcribed my notes into a computer-based scheduler would be really nice; I haven't yet kicked the pen-and-paper habit yet, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. (The business model, as I understand, partially rests on licensing a section of the dot space to mail-order catalogs, Filofax, and such, so applications know where the input came from.) I'm not sure whether it will work in practice, but it's not nearly as limited a concept as the CueCat's.
posted by snarkout at 3:05 PM on December 17, 2001

Would you buy a $100 dollar replacement for your stylus if it a) worked with your PDA the way your current stylus does b) also drew permanent marks on paper and c) digitized everything you wrote on paper into your pa(Incuding text recognition)?

If you can sans the text recognition, check this out.
posted by stew560 at 7:00 PM on December 17, 2001

btw - They do PalmOS too...
posted by stew560 at 7:02 PM on December 17, 2001

btw... i don't know about a lot of people here, but I can actually type faster than I handwrite something... the reason being is that the things I write look like a gobbledy-gook of a mess unless I take my time. So it is faster for me to type. And while PDAs are a pain in the rear to enter information into, thats why they have those handy-dandy foldable keyboard. And if that doesn't work, hey, that's why they make those wacky things known as laptops.
posted by benjh at 7:18 PM on December 17, 2001