ProjectProposal-Cheng-LunYang
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Problem Description: A multi-purpose digital pen with writing, spell checking, thesaurus, and dictionary features.
Target user group: The user group ranges from elementary school kids, middle school, high school, and college students to working class people. Students can use it to write essays on paper if they prefer. Working people can use that to write notes and have quick spell checks.
Problem Context: All students have the experience of reading a book and seeing a word that he doesn't understand. He has to hold the book at the page, grab a dictionary and flip through with one hand and going down the list to find the word he is looking for. While doing it, he has to constantly refering back to the book for the correct spelling. If the word is really long, it is quite difficult to do.
Also, most people type their essays up on computer because of the spell checking and thesaurus features provided by many word editing software. We were all taught to first write/brainstorm your ideas on papers first before typing them on computers. Some people might prefer to write their essays on a piece of paper instead of typing on a computer. The people who prefer writing on papers have to go through an extra step of typing what they wrote on computer. Wasting their time.
The third scenario is when one is at a work meeting. Some people are faster typing notes on a laptop. Some still prefer writing the notes on their notepads. If the meeting contents include many different symbols or math characters, such as 2^8 or 4/5^3, it slows down even the people with the fastest typing speed. It is easier to hand write the symbols than finding the right key on the keyboard.
Solution: Combining the problems mentioned above, I propose combining the quicktionary pen sold on the market, C-Pen, with the digital pen with few more added features. The users can use the pen to write down the notes and the scanner on the pen will scan the words written. The user has the option to turn on the spell checking feature on the pen. With the spell checker on, the scanner will scan the word written, recognize the letters, and checking if the word is correctly spelled. If the word is spelled wrong, it signals the user with a beep sound and display the correct spelling of the word on it's display screen. Providing instant spell check for the user. Once the pen recognizes the end of a sentence, it will do a grammar check on the whole sentence just as any spell checkers would. With the word recognizing feature, the processor can also convert handwritten notes into typed words when the data is transfered to a computer. So the user does not have to type the whole thing again on the computer and the document can be printed with cleanly typed words.
The pen can also be used as a traditional quicktionary scanner. The user can put the cap of the pen on and turn on the dictionary function to scan the printed word on the book and get the definition.
This pen combines the features of digital pen and quicktionary pen into one package with word recognizing, spell checking features. The quicktionary pens selling on market are bulky and can only be used to scan typed words. If it can be made the size of a digital pen, it can become more user friendly.
The main problem of this proposal is word recognizing. People with messy handwritings make it harder for the pen to recognize the right word. If the user has to constantly correct the words the pen thought it sees, the product may not be very useful.
Sketch:
