Filed under: Macworld, Odds and ends, Bluetooth
Pen-it Bluetooth Digital Pen
Okay, this is just plain cool. Watching MacBreak 59 I came across the Pen-it from Hitachi Maxell. I suggest you watch the video (the segment starts about 6:35), but basically it's an ink pen with built-in Bluetooth. When you use it to write on special paper (which has been pre-printed with literally millions of little dots), it records your strokes for later wireless upload to your Mac. Apparently the pen has a tiny camera which makes this possible. The Pen-it NOTES application on the Mac then retrieves your scribbles as vector data(!) which can be saved or further edited on the Mac. Of course, as Merlin Mann notes, this locks you into their paper, and they don't say exactly how much it will cost. It is also not clear whether this is compatible with Apple's Inkwell technology.
Since this is a brand new product for the Mac (though a PC version has been available for a while), their website is rather incomplete. However, they are running a special promotion for Macworld with a $100-off coupon, bringing the price down to $199 for the pen (and USB charger), one notebook, and the software. It appears that this is the same technology (from Anoto) behind Logitech's io2 Digital Writing System, but it's not clear at all whether the Logitech pen (which is Windows only), would actually be compatible. (If it is, three 128 page notebooks of the Logitech pen's paper sells for about $12.)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Theo said 1:47PM on 1-14-2007
Special paper? Move on.
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Scoyle17 said 2:03PM on 1-14-2007
Looks very suspiciously like Nokia's digital pen that's been around for a few years. It seems to alse have identical features by the sound of it.
http://www.nokia-asia.com/nokia/0,,48885,00.html
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Alan Claver said 3:49PM on 1-14-2007
Yes, I think all of the digital pens use the same OEM equipment. I believe the Leapfrog Fly pen also uses the same OEM hardware although it has much more processing embedded in the pen.
Logitech has had the IO2 bluetooth pen for some time. I hope this product encourages them to produce OS X drivers - for some reason they never had. Unfortunately, IO2 (USB version) doesn't work with Parallels although it does work with the new VMWare beta.
As for the paper, the pen is Anoto compatible which means any pad with the Anoto mark will work. Logitech has a number of pad types on their website - you can also get them online from many places (Amazon for one).
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Graeme said 8:43PM on 1-14-2007
The technology looks interesting, especially the vector images generated.
On the point of lock-in due to the paper used, I wonder how long it will be before someone figures out how to copy, scan or otherwise create a printable template of compatible paper?
As for Alex Lindsay's nasal über-geek response on seeing it, I felt slightly sick.
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WLW said 7:33PM on 1-14-2007
Just a quick grammatical, or perhaps word choice, point: isn't "ink pen" redundant? :-)
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Aram said 3:02PM on 1-14-2007
This is the same technology developed by Anoto about 6-7 years ago. The digital paper contains patterns that encode the placement of that same pattern in the abstract coordinate system. Imagine a piece of paper of the size of US that is full of such small dots, each pattern of dots encoding its coordinate. By passing over the pattern using a camera that is built into the pen your pen knows not only its coordinates relative to the edges of the paper, but even its absolute coordinates on the imaginative large paper. The idea is brilliant, but the major problem used to be (and still is, as far as I understand, but I could be mistaken here) that the pen itself originaly had no capacity to decode the coordinates. Originaly Anoto was considering to have a single set of special servers accessible via Internet on the subsciption basis to do the decoding. I don't know the status at the moment, but it seems like the loosened their requirements and now all of the vendors that license the technology are allowed to supply such decoding servers. Anoto earns on licenses on paper (you can't just print it, that is patented and you should pay licenses for each page) and on licenses for hardware design and software.
While the pattern system used by digital paper from different vendors is always the same, It is not absolutely guaranteed that paper from one supplier would work with a pen from another: each vendor might restrict the "coordinate space" to one sublicensed from Anoto exlusively.
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Eliot said 3:13PM on 1-14-2007
I saw these pens in use on a giant collaborative work surface at SIGGRAPH. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hackaday/234303853/
They wrote a program to generate the paper. So they could print it out in any arbitrary size.
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Fritz Laurel said 5:15PM on 1-14-2007
Sounds like they're not thinking different. Why not use some accelerometers to measure the movement and get rid of the paper?
Cheers,
FL
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Roy Feague said 12:55AM on 1-15-2007
Lots of good comments here. I've been working with this technology for about four years, an would like to clarify a couple of points:
- re: accelerometers, a major benefit of this Anoto technology is that you can discern in software what specific piece of paper the user was writing on. That means, in turn, that you can know what sort of form it was, and interpret the writing accordingly. This is the single biggest advantage of this technology over other digital pens, imho.
- re: architecture, you no longer need to connect to an Anoto server to decode the pattern. Mac or PC-based apps can receive the vectors directly from the local driver that manages USB or Bluetooth communications from the pen. Actually, in the case of Bluetooth, the pen pushes a small file of coordinates to the host machine (Mac in this case), and then you can write applications to process those coordinates, or use existing applications.
re: underlying technology, yes, Nokia's SU-1B, Logitech's io and io2, Maxell's PenIt, and the Leapfrog FlyPen are all built on the same technology.
re: "special paper": it's normal paper, it just has a dot pattern printed on it when the paper is printed. You can print forms with the dot pattern from desktop printers if you have appropriate software.
Satori Labs makes healthcare applications based on this technology. If you have questions about it, I'd be happy to help at roy at satorilabs dot com.
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Mat Lu said 1:04AM on 1-15-2007
@WLW
Not really; I wanted to emphasize that it did actually write (in ink) on the paper, and was not just a digital pen.
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algal said 2:35AM on 1-15-2007
FYI, you can use the Nokia digital pen on a Mac right now -- through Parallels. It's a nuisance, but it works.
The Nokia pen (and others, I'd imagine) comes with a PDF that you can print out to produce your own magic dot paper. That said, the dots were too high resolution for me to print it successfully with my cheap old printer. The replacement notepads aren't really too expensive (check out Oxford Easybooks).
The pen's a great way to get a quick digital copy of a sketch, an equation, a table, anything that's difficult to type, or anything that you want to record when you don't want to carry a computer.
Speaking for the Nokia pen, the biggest downside is the battery life, which provides only 2-3 hours of writing time. Also, it syncs to the computer only through USB, not through Bluetooth. Bluetooth sync is restricted to uselessly small pages, and works with mobile phones but not with OSX because of some kind of compatibility issue.
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nomad said 4:07AM on 1-15-2007
Interesting comments - Several years ago I used to be the unofficial/offical Anoto Ambassador and have been using (and still do) the Nokia pen using Bluetooth with Mac OS - in fact a pretty coomprehensive demo was provided to Apple personel (including sending Steve Jobs a postcard from the evening gala event home to the good old US of A)at the Paris Expo a couple of years back. The aim was to get Apple to buy in to the concept which they did under the guidance of Phil Schiller integrating it with Apple's Inkwell technology.
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nomad said 4:20AM on 1-15-2007
Reference my last and the postcard - perhaps I should explain further since I intend to use it with the new iPhone (3G HSDPA - European version 2). Take a digital picture using the built-in digital camera , write a note and the address on a piece of anoto paper and send your comments via bluetooth to the iPhone. Upon receipt the iPhone will combine the image and notes (and address) and transmit them to a server whereupon a server will instruct the printer to print the image and text on a good old fashioned postacrd delivered in the post the next day - the postacrd was written in Paris and received in the USA one day later. Let your imagine run with what else you could do! And for those of you reading this who say "so what" many people still like to have that ultimate touchy feely thing evn in this electronic age. Anyway for waht it is worth the demo was a world first and Apple must have been impressed otherwise they would not have assigned a development team to the technology.
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nomad said 4:24AM on 1-15-2007
Sorry combining your own handwriting with the digital image - not text. Just like you used to in the olden days and how the elderly (and technophobic)still do today.
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Hans said 9:35AM on 1-15-2007
>under the guidance of Phil Schiller integrating it with Apple's Inkwell technology
Alright, you have my attention. If I buy this new Mac-friendly Anoto bundle now does it look like I'll be able to use Inkwell for recognition soon?
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nomad said 11:06AM on 1-16-2007
Hans - the simple answer is I do not know. It is sometime since I was involved in Anoto and to be honest the pens I have that work with Apple over bluetooth and with Inkwell and prototypes given to me by the founder for evaulation purposes. Apple tends to take two to three years to develop a new product and from what I have seen the pen is nbot on the drawing board at this time - if and when I have any news about the iPen I will let you know.
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RK said 12:53AM on 1-19-2007
Better Details, but still no user guide, etc...
http://www.maxell.co.jp/e/products/industrial/digitalpen/index.html
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Jean-Michel said 2:34PM on 1-22-2007
I tried this pen at Macworld and asked them whether it could be used as a stylus for inkwell. They said that at the moment this isn't implemented. It would require continuously streaming the data from the pen to the host. The hardware is supposed to support that feature though. But the main idea behind this product is to use it when you don't have your computer around, and then "sync" your pen and computer to transfer the data. The software doesn't do handwriting recognition.
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Hans said 11:13PM on 2-06-2007
Well, I ordered one anyway. SImply being able to effortlessly "scan" notes taken during face-to-face meetings is worth the price of admission.
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Colin Thompson said 8:03AM on 2-09-2007
Just got an email saying they are starting to ship next week. Being in Australia I imagine mine will take aweek or nore to arrive.
Does anyone know of any (Mac) software to print our own paper - I'd like t go A3 if possible?
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