Microsoft Research Asia has a new R&D project, spearheaded by engineer Jian Wang, that at first glance appears to be just another one of those ‘digital pen’ projects that digitally store your writing. Looking closer at the project, informally dubbed the ‘Universal Pen,’ it’s easy to be excited about the potential of the project. Not only can the Universal Pen record what you write on paper, but it knows exactly where you’ve written your comments or scribbled your diagrams and can sync the writing—stored in flash memory inside the marker-sized pen or broadcasted back to a computer via Bluetooth if within range—back to the digital source document. A combination of handwriting- and software-recognition software converts your marks into digital annotations on existing (or new, potentially) documents, even converting hand-drawn flow charts into graphical objects (embedded Visio?).
So that’s great; printing out a document to proof read it would no longer remove it from the digital editing process.
So what’s bad about it? The Universal Pen requires special paper with special, almost-invisible watermarks printed onto it, giving the Universal Pen’s embedded camera something to focus on, which means it won’t work with any old paper. It would be somewhat troublesome to print a new ‘blank’ piece of paper every time you want to create a new document, but if widely adopted, it probably isn’t out of the question that a paper-manufacturer would sell paper with the grids printed in at the factory (assuming the grids are static and not dynamically generated per-document). (Thanks, Henry!)
Read [TechReview]
Update: Reader Louis Koziarz reminds us that the Universal Pen project isn’t fundementally different from the Anoto-based products offered by Logitech, Sony Ericsson, et al.
Read [Anato]
