All for Ink: Digital Pen ~ Tablet PC

Peter at Tabula PC posted an article about the potential competition from another camp of electronic note taking, which can be collectively called Digital Pen.

The technology from such as Anoto is optical based, by placing proprietary pattern onto special paper, snapshots at a certain frequency from the pen camera during handwriting movement can be used to derive the writing or drawing as every small portion of the total pattern contains unique positional information within the full pattern.

Another potential technology is based on ultrasonic positioning, which utilizes ultrasonic transmission from the tip of the pen, and time measurement of the duration since the pulse had left the pen until it reached the receiver. Hand movement signals sent to the receiver located in the base unit will be accordingly reconstructed into ink. You do not have to use any special paper in this case.

By decoupling the ink capturing from the ink processing, it serves those situations well when there is little or no need for real-time processing and feedback from a role of PC.

Both technologies have the advantage of much lower deployment overhead. The former probably has good accuracy and potential of manipulating the patterns to add additional intelligence to the paper. The latter requires nothing more than just normal papar but may impose some logistic issues due to its intrinsic split pen & base unit.

If a corporate's objective is simply to realise front-end ink input, there will probably no question remaining. I guess the ultimate aim of any adoption is to increase productivity with justifiable cost, therefore, how much of added intelligence may not be the top priority at all, and on the other hand, they can always forward leap by leap. I wonder whether Digital Pen would become 2.5G or become the black horse straightaway.

Tablet PC has to look forward to more intelligent software applications that can really take advantage of the hardware platform that is readily to be exploited. Tablet PC should not be a transparent tablet only and really need start to think in ink.