The Affordances of Pens and Paper
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Lecture on Sep 6, 2006
Readings
- The Hot New Medium: Paper. (local copy). Wired Magazine. 9.04. 2001. Silberman.
- PADD: The Paper Augmented Digital Document infrastructure. UIST. 2003. Guimbretiere.
- ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research. CHI. 2006. Yeh et al.
Andrew Hao - Aug 31, 2006 10:58:48 pm
What happened to the Anoto pen? In light of a quick Google search, it appears that all the buzz and hype surrounding Anoto tapered off between 2002 and 2003. The company seems to have laid low, and the paper revolution that Fåhraeus promises in Wired Magazine's The Hot New Medium article seems to have been a victim of low adoption and the challenges of shifting end-users' habits to the new paper-pen-and-pc medium. Additionally, competition from the Microsoft and the Tablet PC juggernaut may have contributed noise to Anoto's pitch.
ButterflyNet is a laudable effort to apply digitized pen interfaces to fields where pen-paper-pc interaction is sorely needed. I am particularly impressed by the implementation of the hotspot idea - a brilliant solution with a intuitive interface to a common problem. (Aside: the project idea is analogous (in a very inexact sense) to a Mashup-type application.)
Finally, the PADD paper (Paper-Augmented Digital Document) advocates the pen/paper interface, touting its portability and ease of use. It sees paper as an intermediate medium to digital documents—electronic documents which are able to enter a paper phase but in the end are re-merged into the electronic realm. I personally believe that the treatment of paper as a very transient and temporary medium may encourage the wasteful use of paper resources (more so than, say, the Anoto's pen/paper model).
Ramy Ghabrial - Sep 01, 2006 04:36:29 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper: Question: Why exactly must the paper be "digital"? Is the paper necessary in calculating the pen's position, or is it possible to contain everything inside the pen? Doing so would probably not allow for most of the more novel uses (sending information to specific companies based on the paper used wouldn't work) but it would do away with the requirement for special paper, enabling you to write on any surface. I imagine a pressure sensor behind the ballpoint, gyroscopes for tilt/movement/gesture recognition, and some sort of wireless communication tech would be enough.
PADDs:Looking at figures 2 and 5, as mentioned in the text, it seems this system might be improved for specific applications. If OCR can be used to interpret the penstrokes, then the fig2 document would now read "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." when it is updated in the digital world, instead of simply having penmarks over it. However, I am unsure of OCR's limitations, and perhaps what I am describing is too complex for current tech. Is it feasible at the moment?
ButterflyNet:This is an interesting case study that can be generalized to just about any field where a mobile means of capturing information for later digital interpretation is required. With respect to the UI, I especially like the time-based association and corresponding timeline with proportional bar heights. The visual specimen tagging, however, strikes me as unwieldy and complicated. For example, instead of having to photograph the bar code, the biologist could simply take as many pictures as needed then mark down the number of pictures on the envelope. The system could then use the timeline to associate the n most recent pictures with the sample.
Hiroki Terashima - Sep 02, 2006 12:38:48 pm
The Hot New Medium: The Anoto documentation includes the statement “The ink is just there to make you feel comfortable”. This and the fact that the dots on the paper help the Anoto pen calculate and record the movement of the pen might answer Ramy's question about whether we can do without the “digital” paper. We can't just be writing on any surface, not seeing what we write, and be satisfied; we need to see what we write, be able to edit what we write, and also be able to keep what we write. I was happy to read that Ericson came up with the idea of dots in his bathtub.
ButterflyNet study shows that there are a lot of things to consider when designing a new system for users. The field work that was done in this study reminded me of the field work that the people at IDEO in the video did, with the exception that the target user was “field experts” for ButterflyNet and “ordinary shoppers” for IDEO. I liked the ButterflyNet's ability to associate media (image, and voice in the future) with the observations using the Anoto technology and smart cameras.
The PADD paper depicts that one of the limiting components in the current prototype is the printer, and suggests that the printer “produce the pattern on demand or [use] pre-printed paper” as possible solutions. The important thing here is to ensure that what gets printed and what is in the database are synchronized. It seems like synchronization is a big issue in almost any application, and usually always hard to get right.
David Hoffman - Sep 02, 2006 05:40:21 pm
The Silberman article makes the Anoto pen system sound like it will be very versatile. I like the idea that there will be a single type of paper dot encoding algorithim that way there won't be a need to check between copmpatibility between an encoding device and a paper dot pattern. One aspect of the system which I am not impressed with is that the pattern is so difficult to produce that it can't be made on normal printers. It seems like they could compromise a little bit of sensitivity to make it a little bit easier to produce the paper. Also, their insistence on no overlapping seems a little excessive. There could be something as simple as just writing a page number to designate a different page instead of making a map the size of half the united states.
The Guimbretiere article on the pluggin for acrobat that lets marks made on a paper be transcribed onto the original document has some serious problems. While it's a clever idea that might help making corrections, I think it would rapidly become a pain. If you made a correction that changes the length of a line, then the text would rescroll and with no recognition and true binding between the comments and the digital text, there is an opportunity for them to become decoupled and thus worthless. A better interface would be a split screen mode where the comments and original document were on top and the editable document were beneath. The the software could have some auto-scroll feature that keeps the original with comments visible as you work through the editable version.
The Butteflynet software system sounds very useful to people who need to integrate different types of data. The transcription tool sounds most useful, but I could imagine it being more trouble than it was worth if the writing were sloppy. Tagging photos, notes, audio and GPS together could definately be useful, and allows researchers to make fewer notes. Overall this system is a pretty good idea but would need to be really reliable if one were to trust it completely with sample organization and catalouging.
Sean Carr - Sep 03, 2006 12:31:10 pm
Wired Article: I was really excited reading this article until I realized how old it was. There is so much hype in this one that makes you think the world around you is going to change drastically. Several years after we are all supposed to be using Anoto based products everywhere I have still yet to see one anywhere. Even so it still sounds like there will be a future for Anoto or similar products, just not as soon as the hype in this article suggests. Any major adoption like they talk about in the article takes time. The release of this product also coincided with a lull in technology investment and exploration in this country which I'm sure had an influence on the slow uptake.
PADD: This project seems like a good idea but seems young. The 2 applications they designed for seem very suited for this relationship between the paper and digital world but it might not be so well suited to other realms. As they pointed out there are certain tasks for which paper is better suited and certain for which computer are better suited. What happens when your workflow involves multiple tasks, some of which are more efficient using a pen/paper and some of which require a computer. It would be inefficient to constantly switch between the two environments and constantly sync content. This is where I see the advantage of a Tablet PC. This is coming from someone who rarely uses paper, doesn't mind lugging around extra weight, and is never far from a power outlet. Each system has its benefits and it really depends on the needs of the individual user. It's good to see they included versioning in this early stage though.
ButterflyNet: Wow. This seems like a really cool system, and not just for Biologists. As a photographer I can see this being very desired at the pro-sumer level. There are many tools for augmenting photo shoots with additional data but none I know of even compare to this. Also the hotspot association example seems like a bloggers dream come true. It also seems fairly friendly to non power users which makes it appeal to a broader spectrum of people who may not necessarily be drawn in by the technology alone.
Jason Shangkuan - Sep 03, 2006 03:00:04 pm
The Hot New Medium As mentioned previously, the article sounds exciting, but then I saw the article date and also asked myself how come I don't see more of these? I think the concept of the digital pen is very exciting, but as part of the brainstorming, some ideas just didnt take into consideration the actual market or have a sanity check. For example, we have to use a special paper in order to use this pen, which means I have to pay a lot more for single sheet of "special" paper as opposed to just using regular paper. Another aspect I think that was implemented well is the wireless connection because it will communicate with any device around it to connect to the net. However, this begs the question again, which is why isn't it more popular? From my understanding of this article and the age, the implementation could be better.
PADDs Although it is an interesting idea to merge digital documents with what we write by hand, I can't help but think that doesnt this almost exist? For example, one can print his/her documents on the special digital paper for the digital pens and make annotations with his/her digital pen on the paper. When the pen is synced with the computer then just a minor software change will be able to overlay the corrections to the original document. On the other hand, if the handwritten changes can be modified and becoming digital text, and the document is able to recognize and make those changes then this would be a great idea and implementation of the digital pen or PADDs.
Butterfly Net This application of integrating multiple devices such as camera pen pc is a very interesting and successful implementation. However, this was developed specifically for this field study, and did not mention what failed or how consistent the system was. The paper did show metrics on the effectiveness on field time and data, but it does not mention the consistency of transcription or how what did not work well for hotspots. In order to sell to consumers this idea, all aspects that are prone to failure have to be identified and an associated solution must be implemented.
CharlesLeung - Sep 03, 2006 02:56:54 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper It seems like the article by Silberman oversimplifies the barriers that the Anoto pen will have to overcome in order to become widely used. Honestly, before this class I’ve never heard of these pens and I’ve never seen any product at Staples (or any other office supply store) stating that it is Anoto compatible digital paper. It’s been five years since this article was written, but where are these Anoto products and where can they be found?
PADD This seems like an interesting project because it allows the user to use whichever medium he or she feels the most comfortable with. Although the people in the class are very comfortable with new technology, many people in the real world aren’t. This kind of flexibility increases the chance for it to be accepted by a broader demographic. That’s good.
ButterflyNet One aspect that I really liked in this paper was that the researchers wanted to be able to easily incorporate different forms of data together. I also really liked that they identified a real problem (research being wasted because of an inconvenient medium) and found a rather clever solution to solve it. I would agree that the barcode seems like it could be clumsy because if you were tracking a lot of specimens at one time the barcodes could become a hassle.
Robert Taylor - Sep 03, 2006 04:04:48 pm
The Hot New Medium...: The idea that languages, especially those with character-words (like Japanese) being written instead of typed, sounds geat. It seems too bad that anoto requires special paper; a device that coud get a virtual map of the writing area and then use an accelerometer to guage where it was seems even better. It would also be nice if someone could comment on current bluetooth capability: the article, written in 2001, states that in a few years bluetooth would be easily aceessible in a number of places; it also states that bluetooth componennts would only cost $5-20 dollars. Is this true now, 5 years later?
PADD: This seems like a great idea especialy for those who like paper. As mentioned below, transcription would still be useful. Ie incotrporatring the edits for the quick brown fox would be nice. But as it stands this seems like the best (general) idea so far for Anoto.
ButterflyNet: Unless Anoto is streaming, I don't really see anything revolutionary in this; a small scanner probably works just as well. Obviously a pen is smaller and a bit more practical, but the improvements are trivial here. The major issue preventing the pen from being extremely useful is transcription.
Basically, I think Anoto really could have been a success with bettrer transcription, and, if it didn't have it, then streaming capability too.
Patrick Rodriguez - Sep 03, 2006 08:58:52 pm
The Hot New Medium: Like a couple of you guys, I thought that this was an exciting article and probably would have bought into the dream had I read it 5 years ago. I think that the digital pen truly was an innovation, and the article (along with the promo vid we saw in class) showed how it could really change how the world works. The problem is that such a system would require everyone to adopt it before it could really work. Consumers would have to buy the pen while businesses would have to incorporate the pattern. Classic chicken and egg problem. Tablet PCs, on the other hand, work now and complement the status quo (MS Office, familiar API for application developers, etc.)
BTW, Wired seems really gung ho about the digital pen/paper concept. Here's an article from last year about an educational toy based on Anoto technology.
PADD: Not as exciting as the Wired article. It's a little sad that such an innovative idea has devolved into little more than a copyediting tool. While this might be useful for professional copyeditors who still prefer to hand-edit documents, it hardly seems worth it for the rest of us who are fine with editing on a computer.
ButterflyNet: Here we see where using paper has an advantage. I don't handwrite anything (except post-it notes for myself), but I can see why paper is a necessity in some fields. I wouldn't want my carefully collected research data lost if I dropped my laptop in a stream or crashed the hard drive while hiking. It just seems easier and safer with paper. Now they can combine paper with digital representations so they can get the best of both worlds.
Heung Tai - Sep 04, 2006 12:53:28 am
Silberman: When I first see the pen in class, I was very impressed. I hope the technology will come soon. However, after I read this article, everything changed. The article was from 2001, that means the pen was not a very new idea. I search the pen in google, and I see amazon sells it (not a new one, but used from other people). Clearly, this technology is a failure in business. I read customer comments from amazon and know more about the reasons of failure of this digital pen. First, the physical appearance of the pen sucks. The pen is big, and when you check the finish box on the paper, it vibrates. The customer is annoyed by vibration because it causes the weird looking from other people surrounding him. Second, the papers are expensive. I am not sure how much it is, but many customers feel that the cost of owning the pen and using digital paper is so high that getting alternative like tablet pc is much better.
Guimbretiere: The usefulness of the PADD, in my opinion, is only as far as the pda: editing documents, note taking, and at most, drawing. Take a notice that these activities doesn't really use a lot of paper, and in some way are quite formal. These activities also are not very time consuming, so using a PDA is a very good option already. To use PADD, we need to use special paper. That special paper is not expensive, but not as cheap as normal paper. The digital pen is expensive too. I can't remember how many times I lost my pen. The traditional pen/paper combination is good because both pens and papers are cheap and very convenient to get, keep, and carry. The new digital pen/paper model is not easy to get since it requires that specific pen and that special paper. The digital pen/paper model is a very impressive technology, but it's still less than half way through the practical path.
Yeh et al: One major problem for the ButterflyNet is that the technology involves guessing that has only about 78% success rate. The photo and note association is a good idea but it is too hard to implemented. At the first glance, it may seems better than nothing; however, uncertainties in technology can scare away a lot of people. They should either do it well or not having it at the first place. For example, e-commerce is not popular at first until amazon and ebay these big companies come out. People will rather spend more money in local store instead of getting items online. Using Anoto pen for taking note is a little bit redundant since it is not time critical. Simply use a scanner or take a picture of the paper note is more reliable and easier than having the digital pen recognizes position on a special printed paper.
Rayhan Lal - Sep 04, 2006 12:49:48 am
The Hot New Medium: The article emphasizes that “The Anoto pen does not understand language” and thus only limited handwriting-recognition is supported. This makes the technology very restricted because the pen, as I see it, becomes nothing more than a flatbed scanner. Looks like today, $3.74 is the lowest price for 64 sheets of Anoto notebook paper: [1]. I think with greater use and demand the paper could become competitive with stock copy paper. However, since the hype seems to have fallen since 2001 it’s likely the paper will remain more expensive. In response to Robert, the typical Bluetooth device in the $5-20 range is a headset for phones. Have a look: [2]
PADD: With some ease one could write to their heart’s content on regular documents and throw it in a scanner with an ADF (automatic document feeder) and get it digitized fairly quickly (with absolute position preserved). Taking the scanner idea a little further, the Anoto system has some advantages because it selectively records annotation without also recording the original text. But why go through the trouble of marking up a paper, when you can just turn tracking on in Word and edit the paper (especially considering most people can type faster than they write)? Though paper is a good display surface and one might like to make changes on it, the process is cumbersome compared to editing the document directly. As a side note, the effort required to print one’s own paper makes it appear like one would need a dedicated system, since very few systems produce black from additive CMY anymore.
ButterflyNet: I really like the timeline visualization on the ButterflyNet Browser because one is instantly able to jump to where the action is. I feel the concepts illustrated are useful because observations like these need not be directly translated into a document. If such observations are integrated into a research paper then it is more useful to search the notes than to translate them to text. One issue that troubled me was the pen system missed “a few letters or numbers.” In the field keeping your paper completely clean is not necessarily practical and if debris blocks out the dot pattern then essentially the pen becomes useless.
Patti Bao - Sep 04, 2006 01:55:07 pm
Wired: When I first heard of the Anoto pen from Scott Klemmer in one of my classes last semester, I thought it was fairly innovative. However, after reading this article, I feel let down by its very limited OCR capabilities. For example, if I were to take notes with the Anoto pen, I would like to be able to edit and search them later on the computer. As it stands, it seems like all the Anoto pen would give me is a graphic of messy handwriting, in which case, what's to distinguish it from the multitude of pen scanners out there?
PADD: While the concept of syncing physical documents with digital documents has potential (a two-way transmission would be nice!), this execution of the idea seems to take more effort than the results are worth. Instead of proofreading, a more useful application of PADDs might be the standardized forms that doctors have to fill out when examining their patients. That way, doctors can easily update patient records by hand, and before each appointment, the latest version can be printed out. Perhaps this could be the paper/digital compromise that the medical field has been looking for.
ButterflyNet: I think this system is a great example of identifying a real problem, conducting thorough needs finding, and gearing a solution towards the results. I particularly like the use of hotspot-associated photographs, and I agree that it should be expanded to include other forms of media like audio. While there is still room for improvement, the authors acknowledge that there are tradeoffs they have to make to meet user demands. It would be interesting to test out the ButterflyNet browser and see if it can be adapted to other uses.
Natalie Nguyen - Sep 04, 2006 05:15:16 pm
The Hot New Medium: The article is a lot of hype; I also found it a little distasteful in its two-dimensional cultural sketches. The people behind Anoto are to be sure clever, brilliant minds with some big ideas. Perhaps, though, the ideas are TOO big, and the impact imagined by them and the author has yet to be seen -- and perhaps, never will be. As stated in the article: "It's about advocating a standard" -- which is an incredibly huge barrier to entry. The Logitech io2 pen goes for $150 a pop on Amazon.com. A $150 pen I could easily lose, which doesn't understand what I'm writing, which also doesn't have a particularly interesting software base to me ... Anoto has a lot more to go before it can truly and successfully "reinvent" paper.
Paper Augmented Digital Documents: This paper claims their work attempts to "bridge the gap between the digital and the paper world." However, the project is a little too green to effectively advocate the PADD model over alternative, mostly cheaper (yet more awkward) approaches. I am unfamiliar with blueprinting, but I know that in the case of proofreading papers, it's impossible for me to do without printing them out and having a copy in front of me. The pain, however, is not really in seeing my annotations appear overlaid on the digital document, but in the tedium of having to manually process all the corrections. This is the obvious next step in their work.
ButterflyNet: This was the most interesting of the articles to me. The work addresses an obvious need in the biological field while also being relevant to other fields (I concur with one of their participants -- I would love to have something like this for a travel journal!). The interface seems clean and intuitive, and seems to successfully glue together a variety of different types of data. Although the hotspot recognition was 78.3%, they noted that many of the errors was made by a single participant. This suggests that for the most part, the hotspot was easy to learn, and that with proper usage, let alone ongoing efforts in the technology, the hotspot recognition can be far more consistent. There is a learning curve with ButterflyNet, but it doesn't seem very steep.
Keenahn Jung - Sep 04, 2006 07:06:16 pm
The Hot New Medium: LOL @ "There are three fundamental technologies for gathering, storing, and spreading information - voice, computer, and paper and pen" I mean, ok, when you put it like that, how can I not be convinced to buy your pen? But seriously, I have to say the idea is darn cool. I mean, the idea of using a CMOS sensor to read in tiny pixels of invisible ink on the special paper is pretty smart. I do not think that it will revolutionize pen and paper communication (as evidenced by its non success since this article was printed), but still the idea is solid. I would actually really like to see this product succeed because I love pens and other writing implements in terms of UI. It is true that they are ubiquitous in our society, and as much as I love mouse and keyboard, you really can't beat a pen in terms of ease of use and portability. If this will be "Pen 2.0" then I welcome it.
Paper Augmented Digital Documents: This product would definitely fill a niche in the proofreading and brainstorming market. It is true, all of my recent papers have been edited using ink and fiber because it is simply an easier interface for making corrections. "Track changes" is a weak approximation of this. However, as mentioned in the previous comments, this product has a long way to go from being simply a databse of the "diff" between a scanned image and an original image. Also, for those familiar with pictochat or other multiplayer drawing canvas apps, this product has huge potential for brainstorming! Users could draw ideas on paper, everyone could get their digital copy, draw on it in real time, etc.
ButterflyNet: This is a great first use study. The prototype system incorporates a lot of good ideas, which of course need improvement, refinement, etc. One qualitative improvement I can suggest is to simply provide paper with templates printed on it. The user would simply have to trace the hotspot brackets, and I suspect recognition would improve drastically. I also really like the timeline association, but agree that the mechanic of taking a picture of a barcode (for specimen tagging) is somewhat awkward.
Tak Wong - Sep 04, 2006 08:11:39 pm
The Hot New Medium: The article made the Anoto pen sound like it is already or will very soon be widely used. Obvisouly, we don't see it in typical office supply stores. I liked how the author discussed the thought process of coming up with the pen idea, but it didn't convince me as a reader to think it is as fabilous as it claims. I don't see an example of how the Anoto pen is used in real life. It's a little like all talk and not much proof.
PADD: As I'm reading the article, I was wondering how Anoto can store all its customer's data in its database. If our CS department use this Anoto technology, we print thousands of paper per day and all these pages must be stored in its database. Within a year or two, it will be very costly to keep these data around. So the question is: How will Anoto clean its database? Is there some way they can track if a page is thrown away, or perhaps have the user check a box if the paper no longer needs to be supported?
ButterflyNet: This is a very interesting article that gives enough background on the nature of the work and "the pen in action". The question with this article is: Is it really that hard to do text recoginition? All 3 articles seem to avoid this approach and instead, it lets the user compare the edited image and their data entry on the computer screen. If you have to end up transcribing the editing, then what's the point of loading the image on the screen? Yeah it'll be slightly easier to compare, but is it worth all the work?
Yimin Yao - Sep 04, 2006 07:53:07 pm
Hot New Media: As some of you have commented, it is unfortunated that regular paper can not be used. However, compared to the electronic ink stuff i read a few years back, the "digitalized" paper used here is quite impressive in its relatively low cost and extreme similarity to normal paper. I think this can in fact be applied to situations where both paper interface and digitalized data copy is needed, but the lack of character recognition definitely limits its applications. Moreover, most of the applications mentions require the universal adaption of digital pen and paper, which then also depend on the popular acceptance of the applications.. thus, as cool as the innovation was, it has not been successful in making its appearance in our daily lives.
Butterfly Net: The idea of exploring the potential applications of such digital technology in field biology research is very good, due to the nature of feild biologists' work involving multimedia data sources and the large amount of information needed to be organized. However, given that biologists have the tradition of following a specific protocol or precedure closely throughout their research, the additional attentions (ie. the tagging, new camera, specialized pen, etc.) required to achieve the integration of multiple data sources might seem overwhelming. Although brief techniques can be learnt through brief training, the lack of motivation for dramatically changing their data access environment is expected. I would think, a simpler system with improvement in one aspect of their field work/data organization would be more realistic in initiating the transiformation of the way information is process in field biology.
PADD: The need for the link between paper and computer world is needed, and the PADD developers seem to have directed their aim at improving a very universal task such as proofreading (an problem not coveredby tablet PC) to win popularity for their product. However, I find that there are many issues need to be solved before such product can be useful. for example, without OCR, the digitalized "edited" paper is not much better than scanned version other than better quality, because manual correction to the original text is still prequired. Second, if settings need to be changed to received data from different digital pen, whose digital pen do we use? the writer's, or the proofreader's?
Eric Yoon - Sep 04, 2006 08:25:43 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper. It's an impressive technology, in particular because the paper is so cheap and no costlier than normal copy stock. But I do somewhat wonder whether or not the end action that is required -- placing the pen in a holder, which in turn is connected to a Internet-connected computer that sends out the requested messages -- is still going to be an impediment to the widespread use of the technology. What happens, for example, if a person who checks a box to subscribe to a magazine, for example, decides not to subscribe? In the paper world, he'd just throw his application into the trash. With an Anoto pen, he has to figure out some way to delete the request from his pen -- which, depending on the computer interface, could be something of a chore. The Anoto Pen is also meant to increase the accessibility of the Internet and digital communication to those who couldn't imagine touching a computer -- take, for example, the calligraphy grandmother in the video. But would the calligraphy grandmother be willing to set up the requisite software on an Internet-ready computer, and connect the pen holder as required? But those who are easily capable of doing such things, aren't they comfortable enough with just e-mail? The pen may not offer enough novelty to tech-saavy people; on the other hand, it runs the danger of still being too complicated for the truly tech-phobic.
PADD. A really interesting article that showcases the strengths of the Anoto approach, as well as some of the challenges that it will face. I didn't think at all about the problem of compatibility with printers -- that the Anoto paper dots might be covered up by the toner used by common commercial laser printers! This raises the spectre of Anoto trying to create a new standard for other companies to follow.
On the other hand, having worked in a commercial law office before, I can only say that the Anoto would be of great use in editing documents. Lawyers use (of course) a great deal of paper, and much of their job involves redrafting documents over and over again, adding thoughts and crossing out letters. Many prefer to sit back and do this by hand, with a pen, on a printed piece of paper, rather than changing documents directly on a screen. You can look at different parts of a page faster with paper than on a computer; and the paper, being higher resolution, is easier on the eyes than a screen. Papers are also a lot easier to skim quickly than text on a computer, which has to be scrolled, an effect that is unpleasant to follow with the eyes. The main challenge facing Anoto, though, is to get users to use a certain kind of editing style -- to differentiate a "comment to self" from a phrase insertion, for example -- so that the right changes are made to the digital document. The Anoto software will have to be maximally flexible, too, to grant editors the kind of freedom that they have come to expect when using pen and paper -- to, for example, make comments and edits, and then cross them out; to use commonly used arrows and lines to indicate their changes; to write a mixture of comments and edits and not have them confused with each other. That would be quite a software/inteface design challenge.
ButterflyNet. A great example of the design of an application for the digital pen. It is interesting to note that the field workers appreciated most what seems the most basic feature of the pen -- the ability to transcribe hand-written work to something that is stored in a database and can be manipulated later digitally. This feature in itself is applicable to so many different fields, even (and perhaps especially) to people running around the mountains researching forests and fauna. Another feature that is applicable to many industries is the ability to link a digital camera's pictures to text that describes or complements each picture. One could see such an application being useful in many environments -- memberships in associations and clubs, police work, prisons, universities.
Jack Yeh - Sep 04, 2006 09:00:21 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper. Skipping about 2-3 paragraphs of hype, this article introduces the digital pen first and immediately advocates that digital paper will replace real paper once it is massly produced. However, as previous posters point out, both digital pen and digital paper are still more expensive comparing to the traditional pen and paper. "What about tablet pc? isn't that more expensive?" is like comparing apple to oranges. Tablet PC brings a new form of interaction, where an user could instantly see the effect of strokes on a colorful monitor. (whether it be searching for map, or writing down telephone numbers) Try to adjust the map (or even zoom in) with digital pen and paper, and you will end up with a mass. (Nothing beats navigating with a mouse when you have limited displaying space) Digital pen might be nice to scribble down quick notes, but it is still a little pricey for that as we speak.
PADD. A really novel idea but doesn't add much to the workflow of proof-reading. For most users, having a copy in hand while changing text is more intuitive than correcting the mistake right on the digital document itself. However, having the digital pen storing data and adding them to the digital copy makes them even harder to modify in the last step. Imagine there are 2 places that require change and you are done correcting the first mistake. Now the position of the 2nd mistake is changed so you still have to find it. A better solution would be marking each position with an unique color and adjust in another way.
mistake1 xxxxxxx ---> omistake1 xxxxx ---> ocorrect1 xxxxxx ---> ocorrect1 xxxxxx xxxx mistake 2 x xxxxomistake2 x omistake2 xxx xx ocorrect2 xxx xx
where o is an unique color for each, and have comment bubble pops up when the mouse stay over that color dot for more than a second
ButterflyNet. A really good combination of different types of technology in collecting data. If there was a timestamp to each photo taken (with their prototype or any smartphone) and the digital pen, the entire session can be sorted by time easily. The next step would be adding Audio Log support. (Shouldn't be too expensive as the current digital recorder are much cheaper than digital pen) Add time stamp and streaming to all 3 of them and you will end up with a powerful data collection system. (collect data in 3 ways) -> sort by time -> association
Silberman Article: Anoto's business model of creating the technology, but then only managing the network seems like a good idea. That way, they can leave the manufacturing up to the other companies with much more experience (Bic, Montblanc, HP). The competition between those companies would likely produce better designs at lower costs than Anoto could achieve by themselves. Also, by managing the network, they maintain control of the flow of information and can keep the infrastructure standardized, thereby making it more efficient and accessible to client companies.
Yeh Paper: The ButterflyNet work reminds me of Teranode, a startup company dedicated more to lab-based biology than field work. They also hope to replace or supplement the lab notebook, but they additionally aim to help establish a new "lab language." That is, create for biology a symbol-based method of communication similar to those already used in architecture, circuit design, and other fields. The combination of such a unified language would likely increase Butterflynet's potential to make field work more efficient.
Guimbretiere Paper: The proposed use of the PADD system in an architectural sense is well taken. Structural engineering firms produce enormous amounts of paper waste due to the repeated cycle of creating, commenting, and modifying sets of blueprints over the course of a project. The PADD system could help reduce the amount of waste. Also, creating a central database for the PADD blueprints would provide quick access to engineers, architects, and contractors.
Robert Held- Sep 04, 2006 11:05:54 pm
Silberman Article: Anoto's business model of creating the technology, but then only managing the network seems like a good idea. That way, they can leave the manufacturing up to the other companies with much more experience (Bic, Montblanc, HP). The competition between those companies would likely produce better designs at lower costs than Anoto could achieve by themselves. Also, by managing the network, they maintain control of the flow of information and can keep the infrastructure standardized, thereby making it more efficient and accessible to client companies.
Yeh Paper: The ButterflyNet work reminds me of Teranode, a startup company dedicated more to lab-based biology than field work. They also hope to replace or supplement the lab notebook, but they additionally aim to help establish a new "lab language." That is, create for biology a symbol-based method of communication similar to those already used in architecture, circuit design, and other fields. The combination of such a unified language would likely increase Butterflynet's potential to make field work more efficient.
Guimbretiere Paper: The proposed use of the PADD system in an architectural sense is well taken. Structural engineering firms produce enormous amounts of paper waste due to the repeated cycle of creating, commenting, and modifying sets of blueprints over the course of a project. The PADD system could help reduce the amount of waste. Also, creating a central database for the PADD blueprints would provide quick access to engineers, architects, and contractors.
Anirudh Vemprala - Sep 04, 2006 10:55:17 pm
Wired article: I found the description of how the device worked rather interesting. Also, the numerous examples of how this technology could affect information and computing was pretty exciting to read.
PADDs: I think the author made a bad choice by using the idea of proof-reading as a test scenario. I personally think that proof-reading an electronic document is a lot better because you get to see the results instantaneously. It doesn't make sense to print out something you want to change. The reviewing functionality in MS Word is pretty nifty and something that I'd rather use for proof-reading documents.
ButterflyNet: The mix of paper and digital technology was really awesome. I think the researchers did a great job solving this design problem by not overloading on technology (with Tablet PCs eg) when they could have easily done so and reduced the flexibility they provided the biologists.
Andrew Tran - Sep 04, 2006 11:30:14 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper: Even though other students have already asked the question of "what happen to the Anoto pen", I just can't help myself reasking it after reading the article. At first i thought this was a new technology and as reading i believed by winter it would be massed produced and used. Then i noticed that it was an old article, 5 years old. Silberman gave so much hype to the anoto pen, and stated it would be widely used by the end of that year. Now im wondering how come i never heard of the anoto pen until recently presented in class?
PADD: After reading the article, it seems that this whole invention would only be useful and mostly used in the corporate world. Everyday users would not really care about its usefulness. Im also wondering what other uses does the PADD have other than using it for a general proofreading purpose, which was basically the only function presented in the article. In my opinion i don't think the PADD would "make it", or it needs vast amounts of improvements and changes in order for it to be accepted in the corporate industry.
ButterflyNet: I believe ButterflyNet is a neat tool that can be used by biologist and others. I liked the idea of using hot-spots for images and being able to transfer data back and forth from paper and digital quite easily. The tool still does have some issues that needs to be looked upon, which was already noticed from the designers. This article was also a good source in showing the design-prototype-evaluate cycle.
Randy Hilarbo - Sep 05, 2006 12:33:04 am
As described in the Hot New Medium: Paper, I also think that the digital pen/paper is "something enormous." When I first heard of the Anoto digital pen in class, I was surprised of how much I don't know about it. But after reading the article, I somehow understand how it's popularity has not grown that much yet as is predicted in the article. It requires wide acceptance, both from the industries and the consumers. While the Anoto digital pen opens up a whole lot of new ways of doing things, it also demands a lot on products that will incorporate it (for example, it is subject to security flaws when use in ecommerce, etc.).
I found the project PADD a little complicated. The requirements of the printer, patterned paper, database do not seem to make satisfying the project goals worth it. It still seems easier to just edit your documents and scan them or edit them on a computer. However, I found the article interesting, helpful and long. It helps me in thinking about possible project ideas.
I used to work in a research lab where they were storing digital copies of field notes so that they can easily be accesed online. It was a really slow and annoying process. When I first heard of the Anoto digital pen, I first thought if how it would be very helpful for field workers. And I was glad to read how ButterflyNet addresses this. I think that it is very smart. I like how they were really thinking of their subjects in designing ButterflyNet: like how they adopted techniques (automated time-based correlation) that does not require their intended users to change their practices. I also like the UI of their design (like how it would beep/display temporary popups to confirm the user's actions) and how they think about possible feature failures (incorporation of human-readable ID with the barcode just in case the barcode was not recognized).
Maksim Lirov - Sep 05, 2006 01:20:17 am
Silberman article: It was very interesting to read about the details about the Anoto pen design, as well as the motivations behind the making of the digital pen. This article was written 5 years ago, so it seems like the Anoto pen never truly caught on. Pen and paper does have the potential to penatrate markets that digital technology cannot. Writing is very natural for most people, while the usage of computers and computer-like devices does take some time to learn and get used to. However, it seems that the services of the Anoto pen would be a luxury for most people. The success of Anoto's business plan hinged on a wide adoption of Anoto-enabled products, and it seems that this never happened.
PADD infrastructure article: The PADD infrastructure is an interesting concept in that it tries to merge the digital and paper domains. It does have potential uses in document collaboration similar to how the Writely (writely.com) service provides a word processor for collaboration where everyone is editing the same document. However, I think in order to make PADD really useful, in many cases data created in the paper domain needs to be converted to the digital domain when loaded on a computer. For example, if I'm editing a document on a piece of paper, it would be a lot more useful for my corrections to be converted to text when I load the document on a computer, instead of the corrections showing up as just images of what I wrote. Furthermore, the issue of syncrhonization must be carefully addressed such that changes to documents happen in an orderly fashion.
ButterflyNet article: Like other people, I was impressed most with the ability to link photos with a specific spot on paper. The ButterflyNet system seems like a great idea of enriching hand-written data with data of other forms of data (GPS logs, audio, video, timestamps, etc...). I also found the association of annotations and data by the time they were taken to be a very useful feature to researchers collecting data in the field.
Qingyun Tang - Sep 04, 2006 11:12:37 pm
The Hot New Medium: Anoto is doing a fantastic job linking the old fashioned paper with the new technology. People still stick with paper and pencils today for reasons, because they are very easy to use and anybody can sketch anything on paper with pencils easily. The new digitalized world is very efficient; however, it is more complicated to use and it requires more instruments than the simple old paper and pencil. With the Anoto pen, we can link the old and new technology together. It is a pity that the pen requires special paper and there is no OCR function in the content it writes. I think they made this for reason. People prefer to use paper because pictures can be easily drawn on it combined with other texts. If OCR is used on all the contents, the program will for sure wrongly recognize pictures as characters. This is still limited by the current technology. If there is a way to switch between the modes on a plain paper with this magic pen, that would be great.
PADD: It is a very good idea to have the traditional paper link with the digital world through synchronizing. However, without OCR and proper formatting the contents, wouldn’t it be easier just to scan the paper instead of using the digital pen? To synchronizing the contents, the process is also very complicated: the printing does not work on all the printers, only with specific inks and models. Problems like this could be troublesome for users of the products. Who wants to go through all these hassles to just make a few changes on special paper when they can simply write it on a regular paper and scan everything into the computer? If problems like this can be solved, the dream of paperless offices will eventually be achieved to save the forests.
ButterflyNet: This article is mainly focused on how paper based technology could help biologists in many different ways when they are collecting data or doing experiments at field places. The result of using these instruments to perform the jobs is satisfactory in general. It becomes faster and more efficient for data collection, data transcribing, and data classification. However, this method is not easy to learn in the first hand. Taking pictures with that fancy device and inserting the pictures onto a piece of paper sounds like magic. If I were the biologist who works in field, I would much prefer that someone provide me a specific tool for entering data and classify things automatically than this general method that just taking a long time to get used to.
Chen Chang - Sep 05, 2006 04:59:57 am
The Hot New Medium: After reading this "energetic" article about Anoto and the digital paper-and-pen world, I can only give them credit for an attempt at building the bridge between the analog (paper and pens) and digital worlds (computers and internet). I say this because its obvious to note that the article was written in 2001 but I have yet to see one of these things in the mainstream retail markets. On the other hand, the article did point me in the optimistic direction at times. One fact that stuck out in particular is that Anoto pens and digital paper are useful for foreign languages such as Japanese and Chinese where its something a standard computer cannot do at ease -- translating thoughts into a QWERTY keyboard. The pen strokes for Japanese kanji characters or traditional Chinese characters get stored into the Anoto pen database to appear later in digital format as well as immediately showing up on the special paper being written on; this preserves the natural writing routine for Asian languages and doesn't require the writer to think an extra step such as converting the Chinese to pinyin characters in order to be inputted on a keyboard.
PADD: The Paper Augmented Digital Document infrastructure seems like a good idea but also a good idea that requires further development (kind of makes me wonder if some extra time spent brainstorming in the first place would have helped). As the article pointed out, the digital world features editing, sharing, and archiving as tasks best suited for this type of environment. On the other side, the paper world features easy navigation and annotation. I feel that it all depends on the exact situation to determine whether the digital method or the analog method is clearly the better choice. In that sense, constant updating and syncing of data between digital and analog options is wasteful and other options should be considered.
ButterflyNet: This biological case study intergrates paper notes with digital photographs and is something I found to be very practical and well depicted for a real life situation. I believe this is the first reading that has given credit to analog paper having its advantages over its digital counterparts whereas its usually paper that gets called obsolete. I am pretty "old school" myself and actually prefer printing out powerpoint lecture slides on paper and jotting down notes rather than typing notes onto the slides themselves on a laptop. I can easily see why these biologists valued paper so highly as the notebooks they jotted in can be described as cheap and cost effective (compared to digital paper or a tablet pc), have inifinite battery power (compared to a centrino laptop dying out after a couple of hours), turn on immediately (sometimes its all about capturing the moment in nature so a few seconds waiting for boot-up can be costly), and is robust (data can be recovered from a notebook that landed in a river but can you say the same for a laptop?). In the field biologist sense, paper is the secure and more "rugged" choice and along with graceful degradation the analog and digital worlds can thrive.
Suthee Chaidaroon - Sep 05, 2006 02:24:12 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper I agree with Fahraeus that Anoto Pen is the most advance digital input device right now. This input device takes input from users in a reverse approach from a traditional input screen device like Palms or Microsoft Tablets. Anoto developers designed an Anoto pen as a stroke recorder, and Anoto paper as a collection of arrays of a million carbon dots in absolute position. This design decision reduces the cost of producing Anoto paper. As a result of inexpensive digital paper, more companies are willing to use Anoto paper to advertise or sell their products. This is a great business model in which is similar to what Google or Ebay are doing in terms of making it harder for their competitors to enter to their market shares by increasing the number of users and partnerships. In the future, Anoto will try very hard to make people use its digital pen. Then, it wouldn't be surprised to get an Anoto pen for free.
PADD: As the paper has suggested, PADD system uses a printer to move a document from digital to analog world, while it relies on a digital pen to transit updated information from analog world back to a digital world. This application does not seem complicate when there is only a single user synchronizing documents. However, multiple users update the same documents will make the PADD's synchronization requires a version controlling and transaction system. This PADD system still has more rooms for improvement. For example, in proofreading application, the users might want the system to automatically update their paper after they did a proofread.
ButterflyNet: The first thing I like about this project is that the developers interviewed biologists to gather some design requirements. They approached the design problems by observing users in which is same as what IDEO company did on the in-class video last week. ButterflyNet project also invented some new tools like a smart camera which provides many functionalities that are not found in other input devices such as on spot annotating, communicating with the Anoto pen, or offering real-time visual and audio feedback. In my point of view, the smart camera is too complicated to use for biologists. They need to learn how to associate written documents with captured photographs before they receive a digitized note from ButterflyNet Browser. These complicated steps can cause biologists decide not to use this tool.
Eric Vacca - Sep 05, 2006 06:56:44 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper
I agree with many of the previous posts. The Anoto Pen itself seems like a great innovative idea; however, the special dot matrixed paper is the limiting factor and ultimately why the Anoto Pen hasn't not taken off. Like a few of you have said, if the pen was a stand alone product and worked on any paper it would be much more viable. The ease of using a pen is that you can use it on any paper surface, thus the Anoto Pen is less of a Paper/Digital bridge and more like powerboat to get from one side to the other. Perhaps a good implementation of the digital pen would be to overlay regular paper on a tablet PC (most people need a hard surface to write upon anyway), and so you have a immediate hard copy that can be edited, a digital copy from the strokes, and second digital copy to match for accuracy from the touch screen.
PADD + Butterflynet :
As i stated earlier, the special paper remains the limiting factor for the PADD devices. However there are many niche markets in which the special paper would not be a big deal once new shortcuts and techniques are incorporated. Although i have very rarely thrown down a regular pen ranting about its limitations, there are a few situations which digital merging could positively affect productivity. These situations occur when the portability and ease of use of paper outweighs using a computer, but the pains stem from the redundency of transcribing from the paper world to the digital world. This redundency can easily be fixed by the digital pen at little cost as these research papers have shown.
Butterflynet clarifies a lot of visions i've been recently having of a wireless world where all appliances and products are digital and network accessible. The article articulates a world where field researchers take digital photos and videos, with audio and their notes, all tied together with GPS and timestamping so that all observations can become associated with ease. This is an exciting prospect, but probably will be 20 or more years until it filters through researchers through corporations and into mainstream culture.
Alex Wallisch - Sep 05, 2006 04:51:45 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper
The technology described in this article seems interesting, but I couldn't help worrying about a certain aspect of it. The dot matrix used for digital paper is proported to be as big as half the US. Right now, that seems positively huge, but we know from experience that the demand for a successful new technology rapidly expands. It's odd to talk of something this big as not being scalable, but what happens when this entire grid is used up and there is still more demand? Back when IP was first designed, 2^32 hosts seemed like more than we'd ever need; now people are trying to shift to IPv6 and finding out what a hassle it is. My first instinct is to worry that, should this technology seriously take off (which it doesn't seem like it has since the article was printed, so it may be a moot point), half of the US is going to seem like a very small amount of space.
Paper Augmented Digital Documents
This reading mentions the difficulty of acquiring paper with the Anoto pattern. Isn't one of the huge appeals of digital paper that it's really cheap to produce? If procuring digital paper is significantly more expensive than standard paper, then that seems to be a case against PADDs.
ButterflyNet
The most appealing feature of this system (rather than something more similar to a tablet PC) is the "graceful degradation" mentioned in this article. I would personally still find a tablet PC handier than the ButterflyNet interface (although I recognize that non-computer science people who are quite used to pen-and-paper interfaces are much more likely to be comfortable using ButterflyNet), but in a field setting, a tablet PC might be a bit of a liability. However, ButterflyNet relies on a smart camera in addition to the digital pen/paper system, and this seems to me that it reintroduces the fragility of a computer, thereby defeating the purpose - or at least one of the purposes - of avoiding tablet PCs.
Melissa Jiang - Sep 05, 2006 09:18:48 pm
The Hot New Medium: As many others have stated, I too wonder why there are so little mention of the anoto pen. The article did mention that they want to make alliances with companies first before letting the pen fall into the market but is it really taking this long to accomplish that goal?
PADD: The idea of linking physical documents to digital documents does not personally seem useful to me. It is an impressive feature but I personally see no difference in marking up documents on a regular printed paper as opposed to the marked paper. I prefer having the edited paper next to me so it would not take up more screen space so having the ability to place the two documents side by side remains rather useless. Also, printing, calibrating, all seems like too much of a hassle. I think I'll leave my documents the old fashioned way and convert when they actually have a more practical process for a paperless office.
ButterflyNet: I really liked this article because it posed a real application and study of the paper and pen put to good use. The hotspot is a great idea. The only thing lacking still seems to be the transcribing portion. Transcribing still requires manual input. Even with the image of the written text right next to the excel sheet, I agree when they say the work is still tedious. OCR seems to be the best solution to the problem but why hasn't there been further developments in that area for the pen and paper??
Kang Chen - Sep 05, 2006 09:23:29 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper: There's no doubt the Anoto pen was an innovative idea but all the hype in the article was just overshooting its popularity and possible usages. One, most of the conveniences rely on the fact that other Anoto-enabled products must also be widely demanded. Even if that happens, Anoto has to deal with setting up distributed networks for businesses which ultimately leads to security issues. Secondly, even though I am anti-Microsoft, I would agree that Microsoft's Tablet PC deserved the 1st place in the contest more so than Anoto. Not only does it play well with the existing team of high tech devices but it is also more verstile comparing to the Anoto pen and paper.
PADD: Another neat idea but it seems to come with a huge setup cost. I personally don't see most users willing to get a specialized printer or pre-printed paper and database just to have their work both digitally and physically. Frankly, most OCR programs would only cost a fraction of that and still do a pretty good job at porting heterogeneous data to the computer.
ButterflyNet: The ideas mentioned were really beneficial to field biologists and could probably be extended to other fields as well. The technology certainly showed promise in shortening the amount of time it takes to organize the vast amount of data captured during field work. I also like how the data is readily available for editing afterward and can potentially be widely distributed at a very low cost. The major challenge is probably to get everything such as the barcode and hotspots working at high accuracy since it will be a major pain to have to review and double check every single entry whether the data recognized by the devices are actually correct.
Michael Moeng - Sep 05, 2006 08:33:00 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper One thing that struck me was the security of using bluetooth as a medium to pass along data sent from the pens. Seeing as examples included filling out orders (presumably including credit card numbers) and even filling out tax forms I'm not sure if the editors at Wired thought of the possibility that one might not want tax form information sent out across bluetooth in a long chain until it reached the IRS. Also, what exactly do they mean with the map thing? How does having 36 dots in a square lead to 272 possible combinations? And how does having so many combinations imply so many sheets of paper... I thought this was somewhat unclear
Paper Augmented Digital Documents The main use I could see for this is as a type of Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) via the database. Using the database in the diagram, one could print out an older version and edit that, if a later one happened to fail or need scrapping. A student could check annotations made by several peers independently instead of seeing them all at once; in case he wanted to ignore Billy-Joe's terrible comments, for example. A blueprint could definitely benefit, since changes by multiple users could be tracked and managed. Without the database, then this does not seem very useful. When I read papers with annotations, I read the paper as I make the changes. Having them on the screen would be annoying since I wouldn't know which one's I'd taken care of yet or not. Blueprints would probably be redrawn or re-printed with a CAD tool anyways for cleanliness. The article says that Paper is a static medium that cannot be modified, re-layout, searched or indexed. Paper is expensive to duplicate and distribute. Paper is expensive to archive. These are reasons for paper->digital in the cycle, not digital->paper.
Butterfly Net This paper to digital platform seems like a good idea. There is a good amount of redundancy to ensure that data is preserved out in the field, such as including readable ID's to the barcode tags. It seems integrating the digital world with paper will be most successful in the technical field, where organization and data accuracy is most important. Ordinary people sending emails and such are more likely to go with the most convenient, or laziest, method they can find for each tastk, be it on paper or on a computer, but probably not both.
Udam Saini - Sep 05, 2006 10:25:38 pm
Wired: It seems that there was quite a bit of buzz concerning the Annoto pen and paper back in 2001. Their vision didn't seem to happen as they have planned. I'm wondering what took the steam out of Annoto or if it was a simple lack of advertisement. I'm curious as to how this backfired and we currently don't know anything about this digital pen and paper idea. Did the tablet PC just take over during those couple years and Annoto never get back on track?
PADD: The paper augmented digital document seems to take (plagiarize) the Annoto idea and extend it for other uses by creating an Adobe plugin with a printer that prints the Annoto digital paper in order to remember annotations on a text document. There are several other ideas, but the core idea seems to be plagiarizing the Annoto framework to come up with a new, better solution. It is interesting to note the idea of plagiarizing ideas in order to extend an unsuccessful user interface into something more promising.
ButterflyNet: I thought it was quite interesting in seeing the full design process of this system with a specific target group. It is interesting to note that even with such a specific target group, the prototype model was cumbersome to quite a few of the biologists who did not use pictures very much in the field work. However, it did seem to excel quite well in associating photographs with notes, and seemed to be very useful to those biologists that did use photographs regularly in their field work. This system would thus, seem to work well with photographers or anyone who takes pictures often without changing very much in the initial prototype.
Leo Chen - Sep 05, 2006 10:25:33 pm
As a user of a Tablet PC I can honestly say that I really see no significant benefits to the Anoto Pen compared to Tablet XP. Everything that you can do with a digital pen and paper I can do with my tablet, the only difference being that my Tablet also has all the typical capabilities one would expect from a computer. So instead of having 2 separate modules: The digital ink and the computer, I have an integrated product that gives consumers a sense of familiarity.
However there is a significant advantage of digital ink compared to my tablet. I have a 4 hour battery life, and my tablet is quite large compared to a pad of paper and a large pen.
The Butterfly net takes advantages of these differences. It's my belief that for Anoto to be successful, (or to have been more successful in the past) more of these niche audiences must be found. For the general consumer, the Anoto is a novelty, something that really isn't needed. The Anoto could be replaced with the new Microsoft Origami machines that are coming out. Most typical consumers don't need the advantage of a longer battery life that Anoto seems to present.
Joe Hart - Sep 05, 2006 10:02:19 pm
The Hot New Medium: Wow you can feel the hype engine going full steam in this article. However, I did like how in depth the article went into the revolutionary concept of absolute positioning. Eventhough Anoto has discovered a way to produce a huge area of digital paper, it would seem that there would be an eventual shortage of unallocated digital paper space. I guess they thought of that since they are basically giving away the technology and consumables (digital paper) but holding onto the digital paper space almost like it were a commodity. Want orders to come streaming in from newspapers? Buy some space. Interesting model, but it has been pointed out in previous posts that Anoto hasn't really gone anywhere since it's launch in 2002. Maybe the marketing wasn't effective? Maybe people just don't want another pda type device they don't really use... maybe it is going the way of palm?
PADD: Before reading this article I was having trouble understanding what Anoto pen projects could be. Most people I know print out their papers, edit with pen, and then spend time fixing the text back on the computer. This can stop-gap some of that repetition. However, the implementation seems to be lacking. If a printer gets jammed the whole system needs adjustment, or if you make a mistake in editing with pen how do you correct your mistake, etc... The missing loop here are edits "magically" showing up directly on the paper as you are editing it. Maybe just a tablet pc would better fill this niche.
ButterflyNet: Another interesting use of the pen paper device. I thought this application was better suited to its users. I agree with the idea of redundancy, simplicity, and ease of use all coming together to help a scientist conduct a study in the field. The added feature of the hotspot made the whole project feel like a pen based blog for scientists. Listening to the feedback at the end of the article make it sound like the whole system could use some polishing, but this article gave me some ideas...
Roland Carlos - Sep 05, 2006 10:13:45 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper: I found it interesting that the article stated that the main source of profits for Anoto was not from the pen or paper, but rather from actually taking a cut on transactions that people did using the pen. The scheme seems complicated, it apparently involves the paper and pen manufacturer, as well as the merchant and Anoto themselves. Anoto is daring in trying to establish a new standard, but their profitability seems to not only be linked to acceptance by customers, but also by established companies as well.
PADD: The Paper Augmented Digital Document infrastructure: The project is smart in acknowledging that paper is not going anywhere, even as we becoming more digital by the day. Paper is still easy-to-use, efficient, and cheap, which is why it will probably last for a long time. PADD takes the strategy of combining the digital and paper worlds to work together. By attaching themselves to an established product (paper), they give themselves a leg up on something that tries to establish a brand new standard. However, they admit that the printer part of their project is the most limiting component, something that will probably have to be solved if they really want to become viable for the business world.
ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research: This came off as a project designed around a real problem rather than some vague idea/concept. It came in wanting to improve one task and then after it proved itself useful to solve that task, it then started thinking about expanding into other areas. Luckily, the project is large enough that its scope doesn't need to just stay purely in field biology research. Again, this project wants to make sure that it will have a viable audience before it advances into complete development.
Julius Cheng - Sep 05, 2006 11:16:26 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper
I, like many of the other students that have commented, was particularly intrigued by the face that this article was dated 2001. This article by all accounts makes the Anoto digital pen and paper technology sound like revolution in information processing. And not only can the dotted paper positioning system can be used for paper, it can be used in a wide variety of applications, to something as drastically different as printing warehouse floors with the pattern to guide moving machines. It is now five years later, and this class is the first I've heard of it. I suspected that the technology came out and was never really successful, and after reading the comments of previous students, I suppose that that is the case. So what factors contributed to the fate that this technology, which was once touted as revolutionary, has befallen?
Paper Augmented Digital Documents
The paper on PADDs was a fairly solid-looking implementation of the Anoto technology. For its purpose, it appears to be fairly useful. However, several problems, though addressed, remained unsolved. These problems are likely to befall many other implementations of the Anoto technology, which is probably one of the reasons for its low market share. First, the dotted paper is expensive to procure and tedious to produce. This seems to entirely defeat one of the primary benefits of paper. Secondly, storing multiple versions of a document that contains handwritten notes costs a huge amount of space. Whereas a text-only document is relatively cheap, adding handwriting represented in JPEG form (I think that's what they did, but I'm not clear on whether it's stored that way or just displayed that way) and having multiple versions increases the space cost manyfold. Lastly, proofreading is only a fraction of all word processing done. Unless the setting requires proofreading often, like a newspaper, it may simply be too expensive and inconvenient to have a PADD system in place just for annotation. Obviously, proofreading up to this point has not been impossible, and it may be that the cost of implementing and integrating the system, as well as training users, is just not worth the benefits.
ButterflyNet
I felt like the ButterflyNet was a well thought-out system, and as evidenced by trial evaluation, it was a success, apart from the visual specimen tags. From the previous two articles I became disillusioned as to the usefulness of this technology, but here I found myself nodding my head and seeing widespread adoption. Perhaps if more creative and useful systems such as this were created, the digital pen technology would finally take off.
On a final note, after reading about PADDs and ButterflyNet, I was frustrated at the lack of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). When I first heard about the pen in class, OCR was immediately the application I thought of. There is no doubt in my mind that if OCR was at a stage where handwriting can be translated to digital text with very high precision, the digital pen technology would take off. Annotations could be automatically processed for PADDs, field biologists' notes could be formatted to text in the ButterflyNet browser for editing on the computer, and so on. OCR has incredibly potential to help digital pens revolutionize the way we work.
Aleksandr (Sasha) Ashpis - Sep 05, 2006 11:19:18 pm
-The Hot New Medium It is impressive that the pen can hold up to 100 pages in its memory. In addition it seems like OCR, optical character recognition can be a good class project. The question I have is it seems limited in size, although the “map” of all paper seems large, eventually if this catches on, wont people run out at some point? As with the Anoto team I see limitless possibility if the standard is adopted, I only hope the talented team at Anoto left us Berkeley students with something they haven’t thought of.
-PADD The PADD approach to proof reading papers is a winner, I personally don’t like to edit on the screen and like to hold the paper in hand. The problem I have commonly run into is that not all editing marks make it back to the original because a common is missed when entering the information back in, with the PADD system it seems like this would be an issue of the past. This step seems like the next logical step beyond just the digital pen, it seems like the options are almost endless. I would also like to add that I am impressed with all the stresses on security, usually with new products less thought is given than what I have read in these papers.
-ButterFly An interesting idea mentioned in the Butterfly article is creating a digital camera that can have user interaction via a stylus, and going even beyond that is coming a digital camera with a digital pen!!! Although from a technological level integrating all digital devices is an awesome challenge to solve, the general user will have difficulty adapting to all the new technology, since most people haven’t even heard of digital pens let along combining them with there cameras.
Scott Friedheim - Sep 05, 2006 11:22:57 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper While it is necessary for the creators of a new innovative product to think big it is also important for them to remember that they are designing to aid or solve a problem. When I was reading this article I found it kind of amusing, and creative on their part, that the Anoto would be the new way to do everything: order flowers, buy something from a magazine, do the dishes! But in order to do everything with the pen, every other product out there would have to revolve their product around the Anoto. This thinking was somewhat backwards to me. For the most part their pen should be trying to adapt to current products.
Paper Augmented Digital Documents: What a great idea that they came up with...I think that this is one of the most important digital/paper interactions that I have to deal with these days. Their idea could have been a bit more automated in the since that corrections made to the printed copy would automatically be updated on the digital version once the pen was synchronized with the computer. However, I fell that rather than dealing with the complication of the special pen/paper/printer that a special (or not) scanner could just do the job using software to do a DIFF of the two documents.
ButterflyNet: I liked these researchers idea the best. They really developed something that served a purpose in solving an information management problem. Also, rather than the pen being awkward to use it was integrated into the system pretty seamlessly. Maybe the more troublesome part was having to have the right kind of paper to write on but that is pretty minuscule.
Bryce Lee - Sep 05, 2006 11:13:50 pm
The Hot New Medium: The tone of this article is very interesting and reminiscent of the dotcom era. The author touts around the technological advances as enough justification for the idea's relevance. A reader walks away from the article only remembering that they can produce enough paper to cover the United States. This staggering statistic conceals the fact that to reach this amount took a retooling of the production design and one can only predict a design change would be necessary if production were ever to exceed this current boundary. Secondly, the article briefly mentions applications but does not provide enough detail about any of them to render them as substantially beneficial.
PADD: The Paper Augmented Digital Document infrastructure: This article's presentation conveyed the power of interfacing paper and pens more effectively than the previous article by bringing a practical perspective. Rather than elaborating about possible applications in an undeveloped infrastructure, PADD has actually been implemented. Furthermore, the developer's choice of integrating the new technology into existing applications (such as blueprints and proofreading) brought a sense of real application of the project. Additionally, the developer's use of current consumer technology further strengthened the project's feasibility.
ButterflyNet: The ButterflyNet application is the most creative application of technology in pens and paper presented, because it goes beyond enhancing an existing practice, as previous examples like PADD did. Instead, it offers a completely new way to conceptualize data and present it using an existing, familiar input. Like PADD, the use of current technology allows the reader to realize the present potential of this technology.
Johnathan Hawley - Sep 05, 2006 11:42:08 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper - This seems like a recap from what we saw in class about the pen. I'm interested in how the paper works. I assume that each little dot is not just a round dot but somehow unique separating it from all the others.
Paper Augmented Digital Documents - This technology seems to be the first logical direction to take with the Anoto pen. In my experiences with proofreading and editing reports and essays, I haven't found it too difficult to make corrections on paper and then make them on the computer. I'm not sure if the problem of having to look back and forth from paper to the computer is compelling enough to really sell this new technology.
ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research - I really liked what the engineers were trying to accomplish with ButterflyNet.
The software was specialized and interactive which was interesting. It seemed
like they kept close tabs on what their users thought of ButterflyNet which was insightful.
Huangnankun - Sep 06, 2006 12:00:55 am
The Hot New Medium
This article is a comprehensive introduction into the anoto pen, its advantages, its limitations, its history and the backgrounds of the company and people who produce it. The whole article has a lot of marketing hype in it.
The article starts off with some marketing material about how easy it is to use the Anoto pen, the fact that everyone is used to using a pen on paper is its greatest advantage. However I do not think that the anoto pen can quite replace real pen since there are a lot of personal preferences when it comes to the writing instrument. I for example do no like pens which are thick and heavy ( which the Anoto pen seems like it will be). The article also mentions that the Digital Paper will likely be cheap and cost “a little more than normal paper”, however a quick check online reveals that 24 pieces of the anoto paper cost about USD$10, which is hardly affordable
The article then compare the Anoto pen to competing technology like the Tablet PC and trumps the Anoto solution because of its ease of use of writing on paper and portability. I think the tabletPC has a few key advantages over the Anoto solution. Firstly the tabletPC stores its strokes in terms of a digital vector format called “ink”, instead of image, which makes storage smaller. Tablet PC also has wide application support in many ink enabled programs such as the MS Office. Tablets also support Gestures and multiple pressure sensitivity, all of which the Anoto technology cannot offer.
The article then goes on to talk about key technologies which makes the Anoto pen work. I learnt that it uses a algorithm generated matrix of dots and an optical sensor to track the pen’s motion over the digital paper. This brings up the issue of durability of these paper. What if the paper is dirtied or wetted? Will the anoto pen still work? Will this also mean that I can’t make corrections “like with an eraser or liquid-paper”?
Next up the article goes on to talk about the founder of the Anoto company, who is a successful entrepreneur because he’s driven and focused in his products and has a great team of developer who compliments each other well. It also talks about the proposed business model of the Anoto company.
In the next part of the article, they talk about the design&developement process of the Anoto digital pen technology. They follow the rough process as described in class. It talks about the Cpen technology which is developed by the same company which has limitations ( you cannot lift the pen while writing ), this acts as a kind of evaluation for the product and motivates the designers to develop the new product. They also considered existing products as a basis for their development. For example, the Bell System’s “stylator” and wacom stylus were considered.
PADD
This article talks about a system built around the anoto technology. The application is for an office paper/computer hybrid system which uses paper to annotation due to its ease of use and transport. Yet the system using the electronic version for its ease of archiving.
The system promises perfect interpolation between paper and the digital medium by using the special anoto paper to digitize the user’s writing and by using printer to print the digital copy onto the special anoto paper which can digitize further edits. These edits can be further stored into the computer as a separate layer to the document.
However a few problems exist for this kind of system. First off, the cost of the afore mentioned anoto paper is extremely high and since both input and output communications to the document database requires the use of this kind of special paper, the cost of using the system might be high.
Secondly, this kind of system leaves little room for intelligible data. Digital documents are usually stored as ASCII text. However, once printed onto the paper medium, commented and re-entered into the computer, these ASCII text would have to be consolidated into some kind of format together with the handwritten comments. The most obvious solution would be to make the ASCII text into an image file, but this will cause loss of search/edit functionality of the original ASCII text.
From this paper, we can also see elements of the design process as explained in class. In this case, the design process focuses first on the user’s needs. Following that, the author researches on the capability of the technologies that will be used. When these are all clear, the author goes on to prototype and provides his testing results.
Butterfly
This outlines a system which uses the anoto pen technology to help biologist to capture data in the field. This paper demonstrates very well the “Analysis” stage of the Boberg & Bagnall process. The first huge part of this paper is devoted to presenting the habits of the 14 field biologist who takes part in this study.
The Butterfly system is essentially a front end data capture system which allow biologist to use anoto digital paper to capture handwritten notes and sketches and digital camera to capture pictures. These information are transferred to a backend database system where they are tagged and organized based on an “association” system.
After the “Analysis” and “Design” stage, both of which were outlined in the paper. The prototype was constructed and then evaluated. This is as outlined in the Boberg & Bagnall process.
Vahe Oughourlian - Sep 05, 2006 11:08:49 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper
This is like many great product previews we read (the one I'm most personally excited about is digital ink) that, just because of the ubiquity of the medium the product tries to emulate, it makes the assumption that the product will immediately take over the market. And really, the entire first paragraph is quite unnecessary. This is much like the hype surrounding bluetooth, where bluetooth would define our interconnectivity with our computers and digial assistants and cell phones. Instead, it's always the new feature that people are struggling with. Here we also see a similar problem develop; the preview claims that we can email and fax without a computer in sight, where the truth is that it still needs a cell phone (at least) to do said sending, at a steep cost (often depending on the service plan) that makes it prohibative to use, and configuration that the user must deal with, which often doesn't work too well. Worse yet is the assumption that every phone that people get will support this feature, and thus everyone with a cell phone will be able to take advantage of this. In the European market, where cell phone purchasing strategy is quite different from the US one (there is a greater choice since carriers don't make exclusive contracts as often with cell manufacturers as they do here, nor do cell phone companies offer the incentives that they do here), this might have worked, but not in the current US market.
PADD: The Paper Augmented Digital Document infrastructure
This paper I really enjoyed. It presents the problems of paper and the problems of tablets and tries to address them with a single, unified solution without thinking too hard about the actual implementation steps, which might keep others from exploring other possiblities. What's really amusing is that the solutions they provide and the problems they address are exactly the problems and solutions I've been thinking about over the past few days, especially in regards to the uniqueness of paper sheets and the ability to add to sheets, then edit them later, although their technical explorations (such as the issue with the opaqueness of black ink as opposed to a mixture of cyan, magenta, and yellow to approximate black) were, of course, more involved. However, they don't deal with two more important issues, especially with the form paper and the annotations. I find that most character recognition software is not particularly accurate, especially at current stages. However, the best handwriting recognition software I have used recently relies on user feedback. A great example is the Nintendo DS, particularly with the game Brain Age. One portion of the game features a series of math questions that you must solve quickly by writing your answer on the touch screen. The device gives you immediate feedback on your accuracy and its understanding of your input. In fact, the DS could be a counterpoint to this entire digital pen idea, since, with it's two screens, it allows review as well as editing and annotation, it allows for long use (about 10 hours average), and it is quite robust (since children do reliably play with it every day). And, it even features wireless communication with other devices over 802.11b connections. Just an idle thought, really.
ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research
This document presents one of the first tangible phases of designing an interface system, particularly in the testing at reevaluation phases. Most insteresting is the focus of the study and design; unlike the previous paper, which looked to solve general problems with paper and pen, this study stated that while its goal may be specific (the field biologist situation), the experiences learned there could be extended to other information-gathering and dissemination situations. One thing that really comes up here more than in the last two pages, though it really becomes more evident here, is the role of secretary in the interations of paper and pen. Once upon a time a secretary did the transcription from pen and paper to type, then later, computer. Now we are the secretaries, responsible for transcription. It is all that time and effort that the digital pen tries to save. Here, we also see examples of a scope that we may not have previously have thought of. Here, the study looks, not only to make the digital pen a better tool, but how it can be incorporated into a larger framework of time-saving, robust, and information-parsing technology. The digital pen is not a means to an end by itself, as it was in the last paper. It's abilites here allow for expansion of several new features for other parts of the project (for instance, incorporating the images in certain places within the digital document). This perspective expands what we really can do with the digital pen, or, really, any new device to enhance the user experience.
Michael Udaltsov - Sep 06, 2006 11:56:32 am
The Hot New Medium: Paper: As many others have already pointed out, the article is old, and the Anoto digital pen/paper haven't really taken off and become popular. The article actually hints at the reason of why it hasn't happened: Anoto planned to build a communication network to allow pens to communicate with companies that provide various services and sell products. That idea probably failed, so now the pens are simply accessories that need a computer (or possibly compatible cell phone) to accept and interpret the pen's signal. However, I believe this may still allow similar capabilities to Anoto's original plans - instead of instantly purchasing something or sending a message, the pen would recognize which pattern it was on, and save the information. The user could then use his/her computer to find out more information about a product and make a purchase, or send a written message using whatever network/internet capabilities are available to the user. This may also reduce security concerns since no private information would need to be sent across a possibly untrustworthy network.
PADD: The article describes a cohabitation of paper and digital versions of the same documents instead of using one or the other exclusively. This seems like a good approach, since either of the two extremes can't utilize both technologies to their fullest potential. If a pure paper-based document is used, then the Anoto (or similar) devices become nothing more than copiers for the information written down or drawn on paper. For a completely digital system, the devices act purely for input, with no further use (other than maybe an original paper copy). The use of both technologies together seems like the best choice, though the article also goes to point out differences between cohabitation and coupling. The PADD implementation uses cohabitation, which uses both computers and paper, but doesn't require both at the same time. This allows someone familiar with only one side of the process to still fully participate and use it, for example writing annotations on a printed document. Coupling means more integration and dependence on a computer system, which increases difficulty and limits paper affordances. It seems that the use of either coupling or cohabitation should be considered on a case-by-case basis, depending on the needs of the specific project or application. Additional technologies such as Tablet PCs could also be considered, but they are more expensive, have a smaller usable area than paper-based devices, and have a higher learning curve.
BUTTERFLYNet: This is interesting implementation that uses the Anoto digital pen and paper to combine notes, drawings, and photos in a digital format for easy access and distribution. The article highlights some of the benefits of the Anoto system, such as durability of paper and potential fallback onto either paper or digital copy if one of the components is lost. There are also some downsides presented, such as the pen sometimes missing strokes, or the difficulty of gesture recognition for picture hotspots. This implementation seems to use the Anoto pen for purely input and storage purposes. Unlike PADD, there isn't a cycle of going between the paper and computer. However, the biologists' notebooks are typically only used once anyway, and stored for reference, so this seems like a good approach. The different BUTTERFLYNet and PADD implementations are helpful in showing some different uses of the Anoto technology, and possibly giving some ideas for the project in this class.
Edward Karuna - Sep 06, 2006 12:36:26 am
In the Wired article, I find it interesting that the actual connection between the written part and the transaction enacted depends on an external device, instead or, say, having a direct wireless connection. Another thing is the question of "What happens when we run out of places on the map?" Even with a map the size of Anoto's, the space will inevitably be exhausted, although, I suppose one could just generate more, with the squares including more dots, then extend the algorithm for that size, but how practical would that be?
PADDs are interesting in their dichotomous existence between the two realms of paper and digital, living separately while in each world, yet requiring certain connections in each, like the digital pen while in paper form, and a computer while in digital form. It is impressive, however, how closely the digital rendition of the documents reflects the changes written or drawn on the paper version. The high sampling rate must be rather costly, as well as the problems that must have arose with very dense bodies of text.
The ButterflyNet study which was conducted mentions paper’s advantage of an “infinite battery life” which seems like an area where any digital pen solution would have trouble competing. The test, only having taken 2.5 hours, probably didn’t address this factor. Possible solutions to this would perhaps involve solar cells powering the pen, or perhaps the pen is powered by disposable batteries, which strikes me as a poor choice of power supply.
Bryant Yu- Sep 06, 2006 01:14:56 am
The Hot New Medium: In the Anoto PR peice, Anoto is trying to do too many things. From programming VCR with a check to mailing flowers to loved one. It seems that the greatest challenge isn't so much the technology the wireless capability, but rather to seemlessly integrate these functions into our lives and into the lives of the nont so tech savy. Portability of this device to other technologies is too hard to manage. In the article, any hand written notes can be converted to machine intelligible instructions. This is simply not the case. Only with hand writing recognition software can Anoto expect to make this work. It seems that there would be a learning curve still involved in learning how to operate these devices. However as a note taking, general human to human interaction, I can see this as a valuable tool improving connectivity between people.
PADD: The presented a good scheme for paper edits and how these edits are displayed. Yeta draw back i clearly see with this system is the PLS. There are finitely many available pages that people can use. Just as the internet is running out of ips, at least from what i understood from the article, so will the PLS.
ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research Here i thought they did a good job of describing a problem and presented a good ways for people to use the Anoto pen. Here they bridged the digital and analog realms while giving a fairly good description of the interface issues as well as the accessibility to information.
David Eitan Poll - Sep 06, 2006 01:09:20 am
I apologize in advance for my criticisms of the pen and paper interface. I simply don't see it as optimal, as I shall explain in my comment.
First, in the Wired article, I think it says a lot that there was lots of hype around a technology that was supposed to change the world but fizzled. I keep hearing the claim that this is an interface that everybody knows how to use, but is it really? When was the last time you checked a box on a sheet of paper to send an e-mail, or drew a shape to indicate that your scribblings are an update? If anything, these types of gestures are more artificial even than using a computer, since we expect computers to respond to us. Paper is a passive listener to what we write, and people would have to learn what to expect from digital paper, when its use is appropriate, etc. To me, claiming that digital paper is as easy to use or as familiar as paper is like claiming that knowing how to use a typewriter will make you computer-literate.
As for the PADD article, much of my commentary is just as above. It's all well and good to suggest that businesses should integrate the process of annotation through both paper and computer-based systems, iterating back and forth between them. But doesn't this defeat the purpose? Now I have to know how to use the digital paper as well as the computer software that will keep my annotations synchronized and organized? It seems to me that there must be a solution that doesn't require this continual shifting back and forth between mediums. I think it already exists, as well, but I will mention this at the end of my commentary. This cyclic process seems like doing video editing by creating a VHS tape, taking it to the cutting board, digitizing it, editing it on the computer, and then outputting to a VHS tape for further revision (rinse and repeat). How tedious! Even if these steps were easy, why complicate things like this?
The ButterflyNet case study is an interesting application for this technology, but it still begs the question of why it's necessary to divide tasks among two separate "devices". I'm a proud owner of a TabletPC, and I don't understand what the benefit of using a real pen and paper is over using something like a tablet. Instead, it forces you to deal with a medium that is, simply put, static, and which lacks the ability to provide feedback without a computer by its side. Why not look to the improving tablet technology where the same things are possible and interfaces are fully customizable? My expectations of a tablet (which is very clearly a computer) are very different from my expectations of a pad and pen. A tablet is supposed to allow me to do things, whereas a pen and pad are simply passive. Never before have I used a pen and pad to communicate. Historically, paper has been accessible only to its immediate owner, and is very rarely if never a shared experience.
Yes, I'm biased, but I truly think that a tablet or some sort of interactive device is a much better interface than the pen and digital paper concept, which is why I think tablets have found much greater success commercially.
Tony Yu Tung Lai - Sep 06, 2006 12:38:30 am
The hot new medium: After reading the article, I am surprised that I have heard absolutely nothing about this anoto pen until now. Actually, no, I am not all that surprise, considering how the technology that it depends on, bluebooth especially, was not popular until the recent year and a half. Now that the general public is no longer scared of the new high tech thing name "bluetooth", may be the Anoto pen can finally make a name for itself...
PADD: I agree with he author when he mentioned the pros about using paper as the medium. The point that I especially like is about the size. If this technology can perform the essntial functions required by the user as well as a laptop, then in that case I would much rather carry a piece of paper and a pen to a construction site than a laptop.
ButterflyNet: One particular feature of ButterflyNet that I think made this experiment such a success is the fact that users get to keep both a digital and hard copy of their notes. By doing so, users would feel better about experimenting with the system, since they can always fall back to the hand written notes if the system is not perfect. I think that this little push for the users to try out the system to it's limit made this experiment a lot more fruitful as opposed to if hand written notes were not preserved.
Suneet Shah - Sep 06, 2006 02:31:57 am
Annoto Pen: I thought this product was a really cool one, and very innovative in the way it uses the grid in the paper to track writing. But I think they went about selling this product the wrong way. By trying to sell to businesses in a way that forces them to reinvent the way they do conventional things like send customer orders etc., they're putting themselves up against a tough adoption curve. This technology seems like something really cool that I would buy myself and toy around with if it was available to me in some sort of package.
PADD: I think the main issue I had with this approach is that to me it doesn't seem like an innovative solution. I see issues with switching between paper and digital versions and it isn't something that you can't already do. The examples they give like making gramatical edits and things like that are easy enough to do on a computer already. The other portions of it seem like nothing beyond the capabilities of a tablet PC or anyone that uses a scanner and OCR. It seems like all you need is clever merging software.
ButterflyNet: This was probably the most unimpressive of all technologies. It basically just integrates a digital camera and existing types of pens that store the handwriting you create, and then it allows you to automatically merge photos into documents.
Simon Tan - Sep 06, 2006 02:40:04 am
Wired
Wired Magazine has a reputation for overhyping new technologies. In E190, while reading articles, we saw many examples of "life-changing" technological innovations that were supposed to be prevalent everywhere... five years ago. I believe in the loop back to pen and paper as the interface of the future, but I don't believe that it has to remain such a wasteful, tree-killing practice. Especially just to produce special paper with the dot map, that consumers and anyone else using Anoto technology must BUY from Anoto. The benefits of a pen and paper, to me, are that I can take any pen/pencil/writing instrument and mark just about any surface I want to, whether it be on a notepad, the back of a receipt, or on a table surface. (I don't vandalize as much as it seems...)
PADDs
The article noted the major drawback I thought of: the need of the printer. So now, not only do we need to buy the paper (because printers cannot print the Anoto dot map), we must spend ink every time we want to use the digital pen and paper. For proofreading materials, I must agree with David Poll (above) who sees the Tablet PC as a much easier medium to use. Perhaps if we develop Tablets that are as fast-loading, durable, and prevalent as paper, we may have a revolution in our hands.
ButterflyNet
This seems to be a very specialized use of a digital pen interface - that of biologists and other field workers who need to take other media (such as pictures) and incorporate them into their handwritten notes easily and digitally. I found it interesting, and look forward to any other developments and uses for digital pens that particular research team discovers.
Antonis Mannaris - Sep 06, 2006 02:18:39 am
The idea of paper being the hot new medium is really great and provides many solutions to the problems mentioned in the PADD article about being able to utilize the advantages of both computer and paper. It also seems that implementing a system that controls this interaction is very feasible and quite flexible. Finally, the ButterflyNet article provides a perfect example of how this technology may affect certain fields.
There is one thing which worries me about the expectations of systems like PADD and the overall effect of digital pens and paper. Articles like "The hot new Medium: Paper", put so much hype into it that it seems they are forgetting about other technologies which may rival this one. A perfect example is the Tablet PC, which more and more people seem to be getting accustomed to. Another technology is voice recognition. What if I can record an e-mail and have it sent in the form of text OR voice? The same applies for form submissions. Another problem which seems to be overlooked is that computers provide an amazing solution to the hazards of producing, using and even destroying paper. So even if we use Annoto pens to take nation-wide exams, we still need millions of exam papers. Maybe investing on the technology to improve Computer Based exams is more to our interest.
However I have to admit that the digital pen technology will almost definitely have a huge effect. Its most powerful aspect in my view is the flexibility it provides to field workers, scientists and engineers that do not (yet) have the luxury of carrying expensive, battery relient devices such as computers to their workplace. So despite my reservations, I will be even more surprised if paper is NOT the new hot medium.
CarrellKillebrew - Sep 06, 2006 04:33:25 am
The Hot New Medium: Paper While being able to use a pen digitally and wirelessly is great and all, I think the benefit of this digital pen is being a bit exaggerated. Yes there are times when I'd like to write on paper instead of be typing. Often times this is because I want to write something that can't be easily converted to digital format. Such as if I'm trying to solve a puzzle, and I'm putting numbers and letters in a grid or something. On the other hand, if I'm writing plain text, the kind of thing the digital pen can convert, then I could write it much fast if I was using a keyboard. Basically, I think there's a huge disadvantage in the fact that I can type much faster than I can write, and not everything can be converted to digital (besides just making everything I write a picture instead of translating it into ASCII text or something).
PADD Instead of requiring the printer to use some special ink and print a special pattern on all papers, wouldn't it be better to examine other ways for the pen to figure out where the user is writing? What if the user flashed the pen over the page number, then as they were writing the pen noticed nearby letters and such. I imagine that if the pen noticed that it had just passed over a certain word, then used technology similar to optical mouses to track where it went from there, it could do a pretty good job of figuring out where the user is annotating.
ButterflyNet I really appreciated the way in which butterflynet 'provides low-threshold and high-ceiling interactions'. The fact that the system still functions very well even when users do not change their current operating practices (through automatic time correlation) is very good. Yet butterfly net still allows advanced users to get more out of the sytem through hotspot tagging. I find that all too many designs either provide too many options and don't supply useful defaults, or make a very dumbed down user interface that advanced users get frustrated using.
Tabassum Khan - Sep 06, 2006 05:15:34 am
The Hot New Medium: This article gives a very good description of the who and how of the Anoto pen and paper and all the good things that this digital device is going to bring into our lives. I applaud the people behind Anoto pen for attempting to reinvent the old-fashioned pen and paper to fit the digital age. This article made a number of claims in April of 2001 which must have intrigued the readers then but since we are fortunate enough to be in 2006, we can tell that most of them didnt materilize. However, the most important thing here is the vision. With all what it can do and cant do, I think that Anoto pen provides a platform on which we will surely witness some great advancement in this field of digitizing pen and paper.
PADD: This article advocates cohabitation - an intermediate solution to the problem of creating Paperless offices. The concept is very innovative, however, like many people, I dont like the idea of having error correcting comments all over my document. Figure 2 and 5 looks pretty messy to me. The pretty picture might not be possible until the pen starts understanding languages and performing OCR. Until then, if someone using this pen wants a cleaner version of a document, he/she will have to resort to the traditional way of writing. Also, I think this article doesnt highlight the full potential of this kind of technology. It has made it a simple editing device.
ButterflyNet: This is one of the field where you just cannot do without pen and paper and where you can see the full potential of this kind of technology. Some other people who rely on pen and paper for their daily work and who can use this kind of technology to make their lives easier are jounalists, ethnographers, archeologists, anthropologists and the list goes on. I found it very interesting that the pen allows you to mark out space on the page of your physical notebook where you would like a particular image to appear in the digital version. This would make the document more organized. The image will be next to the notes and thus more relevant.
Ming Huang - Sep 06, 2006 08:38:12 am
The Wired News article on the Anoto pens, "The Hot New Medium: Paper", is one of the examples of doing something users don't expect with something they are very used to. This contrasts some claims that the digital revolution will completely eliminate the need of physical, expendable media like pen and paper. One can make both a positive argument and a negative one about the promise of this new technology. Pens and paper are cheap, ubiquitous, user friendly, easy to carry, and convenient. However I can foresee the environmental consequence and waste it would cause if popularized. Another drawback is that the pen and paper model does well on storing and sending information but has no ability to receive and display information. In order to display information it has to be printed onto the paper before use. Imagine that you want to look at a global map and a local one at once. There would be two sheets of paper. The more different things you want to see, the more paper you have to carry. It is questionable how good Anoto’s PC-less approach will actually sound in practice. Carrying your pen and paper without an accompanying digital device will be a one-way communication between you and the world. The luggage one ends up having on his back pack may actually be worse than say a tablet PC. Anoto is nothing but another of the numerous attempts to integrate elements in our lives better by digitizing our daily activities more easily. I will not be surprised if a completely handwriting-capable PC that is thin and light enough to carry around is made available in the near future, with an interface that is comparably intuitive with the paper and pen model. Only when technology becomes mature and easy enough will the paper and pen model fade away. Perhaps the Anoto guys already have a solution for all my concerns, but until then I remain skeptical of its success.
“Paper Augmented Digital Documents” presents an interesting perspective in terms of how the tangible pen and paper can coexist with digital equipment to better serve the needs of the user. The task-centric design focus illustrated on the document follows a very straight forward paradigm studied previously in class. It lists all typical use scenarios of the new system and what it is supposed to achieve. They then come up with the architecture and carefully document all its components and their interactions. A prototype is then built and evaluated. They then evaluate the design in practice and carefully record all design trade-offs and workarounds (such as removing the UV-blocking black ink from the printer). They also have gone through some sort of user testing to get feedback. Their design also does not change much of the usage patterns of either the paper or the computer, which is a good way of “plagiarism”. They also resented limitations and future possibilities of the design which will lead forward to the next design cycle. In my eyes the PADD’s cohabitation model works better and fixes some of the downfalls of the original Anoto design: its over-reliance on access to digital devices, and its lack of interactivity. While I don’t believe in Anoto’s short-term success I do appreciate the beauty of paper as described by this document: portability, durability, and resolution.
“ButterflyNet” is yet another approach to absorb heterogeneous information from both real and digital sources and make the transformation and processing of both as seamless as possible. Field biologists are but one among many use groups this method can apply, but to whom the technology is the most helpful. The rest of the paper resemble closely the almost formulaic process followed by the previous paper. A usage study is conducted to gain a better understanding of the situation. This also shows the necessity and helpfulness to have an expert on the field being studied involved in the design process, in this case, obviously, a field biologist. Listed are the use scenarios, functionality requirements, and user focus. The new tool also has the need to integrate with systems already in use to ensure its usefulness and adoption. The user testing of the new system is more thorough and formally documented. There is also the explanation of pitfalls and inconsistencies of the system and the design trade-offs. In general, I find these specific uses of the Anoto technology more practical and believable than the ones listed on the first hype-driven article.
Bowen Li - Sep 06, 2006 09:56:14 am
ButterflyNet: I think one of the key issues here is robustness. Because the information is converted from analog to digital at "run time" then if the pen ever breaks, you are left with only a physical copy with no way of coverting it to digital through Anoto's method. Whereas if a normal pen breaks you can replace it with another pen with no distinction between the two. Also, the article mentioned that a big problem was transcribing information. I agree that this is definitely time consuming, but I wonder if there can exist a program that is both smart enough to transcribe the data correctly and be flexible enough to allow the scientist to change their input method (graph, chart, add another column, etc.) at the time of use. If a program can't do that, then the user will end up doing it themselves later anyways.
The Hot New Medium: I think it's very interesting that Anoto chose to go with a monolithic "one map" system. It seems that these days technology is shifting towards splitting up tasks (dual core, distributed systems, etc) rather than putting them together. Their model of selling ANS services is interesting, but I wonder if it will ever "catch on" as the way to go in the digital pen community. It would seem that the technology could be made without that aspect.
PADD: An interesting point brought up here is the notion of who actually owns the data being produced. In the physical realm it is quite clear: you hand someone a piece of paper, and you no longer have control over it. But now that mixing digital and physical is possible, handing someone a piece of paper may mean that you still have control over that paper. If they write something on it, that information may not belong to them. This kind of control may be relevant in the corporate world, but it is a bit excessive for personal use. However, on the flip side, if I give my paper to someone to correct, they don't ever have to hand it back to me.
Jerry Yu - Sep 06, 2006 11:23:22 am
For those who can't get enough of PADD, there's a recording of a lecture that Francois Guimbretiere gave at Stanford a few years ago.
In general too, it's worth browsing through the archives of this lecture series, as there is interesting stuff in there that may be relevant to your project ideas. Each of the lectures is 1.5 hours long.
Michael Mai - Sep 06, 2006 11:40:18 am
Hot New Medium: Paper
After readig this article, the thing that caught me the most was the idea surrounding the paper. How would using the digitized paper lower the cost for the companies that would use it? In terms of time, the companies that used the Anoto pen and paper would be able to know sooner who is buying their products. However, the Anoto paper technology doesn't bring anything to the products being sold. Also, the paper that woudl have to be used would cost more than normal paper and since you have to send out ads to everyone anyway, you are just increasing the cost of ads with no real advantage in increasing profit.
PADD
I liked this idea because it allows the user to still have comfortability of using paper while being able to edit the document electronically. However, I was wondering how the pen reading deals with errors. Can you go back and delete a mistake you made while using the pen before it gets sent as an update to the network? Also, I believe that the paper/photo copier has a very prevalent place in the workplace and it will be very difficult to compete against. But in terms of relaying data for real-time projects I think this idea would be efficient.
ButterflyNet
The idea surrounding the use of the ButterflyNet looks promising. However, the approach they are taking to reducing the time spent transcribing datasheets is similar to a tool we already have, a scanner. Notes made out in the field or in a mobile job are usually just a quickly jotted note, not particularly coherent or in any particular arrangement. The reason for the lengthy transcribing is that the notes must be translated into data that other people understand and presented it in an organized fashion. Also, what is the cost of this system and how much more would it cost to continually replace this system due to loss of equipment?, whereas a lost notebook and pencil is easily replaced for under a dollar.
Vijay Rudraraju - Sep 06, 2006 11:14:41 am
The Hot New Medium After reading this article, it seems to me that the Annoto digital pen and the Segway share a lot of unfortunate things in common. The creators of both had very significant and broad ambitions for their products that, so far, have been unrequited. After some background reading on both the products, my personal conculsion for the primary reason for their lack of success so far is their inability to identify and deliver a "killer app" for their products. True, there are many "neat" applications for the Annoto pen, but I have yet to read about that one application that I can't live without.
PADD The infrastructure presented in this article provides a concrete and flexible system that fleshes out a real world system that could incorporate the Annoto pen. Personally, I am convinced by the paper's arguments about the limitations of tablet PCs to alleviate the same problems that PADD claims to solve. A tablet PC is still a computer, not a piece of paper. And for the reasons that all these articles have touched upon, it is unlikely that a dynamic display, much less a tablet PC, will incorporate all the form-factor features of paper anytime soon; even with the recent advances of light emitting flexible polymers. Anyone who argues otherwise has never used a tablet PC outside of a sheltered, seated, lighted, non-social setting like a lecture hall. I am rooting for the widespread adaptation of an infrastructure like PADD in the future.
ButterflyNet This article brings focus to the issue of redundant data-entry, which continues to remain a significant thorn in most real-world computer interfaces. Far too many hours are spent mindlessly copying data from one medium to another. Furthermore, far too much knowledge and insight is lost in areas of scientific pursuit simply because there is no way to search the vast catalogue of hand-written notes and text that continue to be the primary medium of record in scientific research. How many times has it occured that a brilliant conjecture or idea was made in the margin of some obscure text?
Jae Chang - Sep 06, 2006 11:55:05 am
The Hot New Medium: Paper: I absolutely agree with Fahraeus' saying that they will have more product coverage than any other company on earth. As drawing on a paper with a pen is much easier than drawing with mouse for people, the Anoto pen will make users' task much easier in every aspects of life. However, the fact that the pen is usable on dotted sheet only will reduce the compatibility and the price of the sheets is stil expensive comparing with the price of plane sheets.
PADD : The PADD infrastructure is very adoptable and the idea is very interesting. However, as the author metioned, Tablet PC can be the treat of the existence of the system itself. Printing a document with dotted sheet, editing with digital pen, and transmitting the image to PC has too many procedures comparing Tablet PC. Tablet PC allows users to achieve the same goal, just write or edit on the screen, and save it. Also, in order to write with different colors, color scanner is need when Tablet PC does not.
ButterflyNet : The ButterflyNet, the integrated environment with PC, digital camera and digital pen, is a very good example of the software application for digital pen. It can be used not only for field study but also for many area. For example, IDEO's suggested brain storming can be easily documentable using the application. Also, it can be used for developing software prototype or design so that the time of documentation can reduced. I believe It is a very good example for software application using digital pen.
Utsav Shah - Sep 06, 2006 11:23:28 am
The Hot New Medium: The first thing that comes to my mind after reading this very detailed article is that why aren't all of us using this product. It seems like that the article was written keeping in mind that this was the next BIG thing. It's been five and half years since the article was posted and till today most of us haven't heard of this technology. I think the reading provides you with every bit of information you want to know about the product but somewhere they missed the point. It's interesting but at the same time it's not appealing.
PADD: At first after reading this paper, I thought it's really cool technology and I should start using it. However, then I thought who wants to go through this hassle when you can do similar things with tablet PCs. One of the things they say PADD could be good use for is "proofreading", well there's really no need to type a paper, print it out, make corrections and feed it back in. You can do all of that on a computer and I think it also saves time.
ButterflyNet: I think it would be nice to have this techonology. It would be nice to have all your data that you use daily in one single notebook. I think it can make field scientists' lives a bit easier. As far as the Interface is concerned, I think it's a good one, in terms of Business I think it has a limited market.
Yen Pai - Sep 06, 2006 10:46:18 am
Hot New Medium: Interesting background story. Like many others here, I wonder why something that seems so promising never caught on. I believe the primary reason is the disconnect between a democratic/ubiquitous technology such as the basic pen/paper and the cutting edge technologies required to support Anoto's pen/paper such as Bluetooth, wireless networks, specialized paper: while the user interface is basic and deeply ingrained in human society and culture, the supporting technologies are, even today, only in use among what most would qualify as "power users."
PADD: I think this paper formalized the material discussed in the Wired article. To me, the most interesting idea is how it begins by trying to define the concept of "document" as a PADD. The article goes on to outline a system and high-level workflow for incorporating digital pen technologies and highlights - perhaps unintentionally - the changes in document management that would be required in organizations in order to smoothly integrate digital pen/paper technologies into everyday use. These document management changes are one reason, in my opinion, why Anoto's technology never became widespread.
ButterflyNet: This study is a great example of how digital pen technology can successfully progress from concept to actuality. The researchers followed a user-centered design approach and integrated digital pen/technology technology into the workflow of the biologists. Importantly, the infrastructure requirements were minimal and the design of the ButterflyNet browser was specialized to the needs of the biologists, rather than as a general application meant to replace paper in all organizations.
This study also highlighted a problem with the digital pen/paper solution and the one huge advantage of basic pen/paper: durability and equipment redundancy. People lose pens all the time but pens are easy to obtain. In the field, a biologist can borrow a pen from a colleague. Forget your notebook, borrow some paper and tape it in your field notebook later. Spill coffee on your notebook? It is still readable and further, the paper can still be written on once it dries.
Kimberly Lau - Sep 06, 2006 12:01:53 pm
Hot New Medium: As I began reading this article, I became just as excited as Christer Fahraeus was while describing the pen. But almost as immediately, I also wondered how he could so confidently claim that "it will not be beaten in our lifetime," especially with cutting edge technology constantly outdoing itself. I was even more surprised when I realized how old the article is, because it shows how much the product has not yet met all these initial expectations. The fact that it has not yet become extremely widespread or dominant in society implies to me that perhaps it can be beaten. Perhaps not by the same digital pen and paper interface, but by other outlets, such as tablets.
PADD: My qualms about completely transferring to the digital world deal with the instances when the digital world fails. Dropped calls, faulty Internet and crashing computers, etc are all problems we must continue to deal with, and when this happens, important files are potentially lost. I like the PADD idea because it automatically gives us a hardcopy file on which we can depend to be there no matter what happens with the digital counterpart.
ButterflyNet: ButterflyNet is a great idea, but also seems to cater specifically to field workers. I like best that it can incorporate digital pictures into the notes, and I think it would be even greater if it could translate the handwritten notes into typewritten ones. Since much of the note-taking is done on the field, the option of digital editing back in the office could be beneficial.
Sung Yi - Sep 06, 2006 12:28:35 pm
WIRED
I don't think how old the device matters so much as many people mentioned.The lack of high sensation of the Anoto pen may be due to different needs at the era, probably not due to unsatisfactory technology.Aside from this, I am wondering about the security problems that the Anoto pen might encounter. I suppose some personal information will be stored in the pen to reduce all the hassle writing personal information when making an order for instance. So what if the pen is lost or stolen?Additionally, to interact with the computer, the paper's grid must be more rigid so that the computer can recognize letters.
PADD
PADD's typical usage is proofreading it says. However, I think the biggest flow of the function of PADD in proofreading is having to print the document again on a special paper and having to write with a pen again. Rather going through this hassle, I think the users are better off just proofreading and editing on the computer. I think this device lacks merits.
ButterflyNET
I was surprised by how the image could be linked onto a paper. Also, not having to worry about batteries is a great merit. However, I still think a labtop or tablet PC is more convenient than this.
Rory Martin - Sep 06, 2006 11:50:18 am
The Hot New Medium: Paper. Each page of Anoto paper is a piece of a giant map that is half the size of the United States. It is unclear as to the advantage of having each page have a unique arrangement of dots, as it would be much easier to manufacture and scale if every sheet merely had a serial number. The article touts this technology as the end all and be all of media, as though everything will soon be using this technology. Personally, I don't want to be able to program my vcr through my newspaper, it seems like a good idea at first, but what happens when there is a conflict? Perhaps somebody else has already set the vcr to record at the same time. Remotely steered forklifts? I don't see how this technology scales to forklifts, it seems like there are many other ways of remotely steering a vehicle, namely using a remote control and a video camera.
PADD. Before coming to college I worked as an accounting clerk, every day I would input the days invoices then print out long reports 50-100pgs, I would then go back and correct them with a pen, then I would correct the digital version, then I would recycle the paper. It would be neither efficient nor cost effective to use digital pen or paper for this task. The paper is more expensive and there is no need to keep a digital record of the corrections themselves (in handwriting form), also, there are generally only a few errors that need to be corrected. Also, computers can be unreliable, companies often keep paper copies of many reports as backups. The idea of a paperless office is inconceivable with current computer technology.
ButterflyNet. My old roommate was a biology student at Cal. She was always working in the field taking photos and measurements. When you are camping out in the middle of nowhere for two weeks you cannot plug a computer in anywhere. The idea of using a digital pen for taking notes in the field seems great, assuming that the pen uses some sort of OCR in order to help transcribe the notes into a digital editable-document. I really like the idea of using brackets to indicate placement of an associated photograph. The association feature should not automatically place the photo in the document, but should rather prompt you for which photo you would like to place in the document given the photographs that have timestamps relatively close to that of the bracket.
Siyan Wang - Sep 06, 2006 12:28:30 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper I find it interesting that Wired has this new technology all hyped up as if it would be extremeley prevalent following the article in 2001, but I've never even heard of the Anoto pen until this class. It's a shame really since the concept seems very innovative and the execution quite sound. However, I'm curious as to how much they can expand the useage of the paper since there is a finite "map" to allocate. It seems like the Comdex awards were given rightfully, as tablets now are much more prevalent than the Anoto technology.
Paper Augmented Digital Documents: This seems like a pretty interesting idea, but just an extension of the Anoto design that doesn't really seem too innovative. Most tablets can already perform such tasks, and transferring the document to paper may seem beneficial in a few ways, but with the advancement of tablet technology, I think we will find tablets capable of all the 3 points where the researcher pointed out that paper was superior. The idea is nice, but to me it seems like a unneeded waste to even transfer it to paper form from the digital, whereas the Anoto design which starts with the paper seems much more intuitive.
ButterflyNet: The design of this system seems like it would be extremely helpful for field biologists, as it definitely seemed like it would streamline their work. This system has a very user-friendly and intuitive interface such as the time-association and the hotspot tagging. I think the addition of OCR to this interface would make it even more powerful and useful, since that seems to be what many of the researchers wanted.
Jonathan Yen - Sep 06, 2006 12:38:07 pm
Wired: I find it rather interesting how Anoto's products apparently have not made any significant impact on the market. I've yet to see digital pens and paper becoming the standard. I think that part of the issue is with the user interface: what you write with Anoto doesn't really become recognized by the computer as words or any meaningful information. All of it is kept as an image, just in digital form. There is no OCR or any information processing that would make it substantially easier for everyday tasks.
PADD: There definitely seems to be a lot of potential in using PADD for annotating digital documents. I think the only flaw is the need for a proprietary pen and paper. However, the method of printing out the document and tracking annotations seems to be much more effective than having a tablet PC or using OCR software.
Even though PADD seems to be a fairly viable solution for proofreading digital documents, I wonder if tablet PCs will ever come to the point where they could be comparable to PADD in terms of affordances. Rephrased in a different way, I wonder if we will ever have paperless offices. Given that technology is becoming cheaper and smaller, it would seem that eventually a tablet PC could be better than a PADD.
ButterflyNet: I was rather surprised that there were people who actually spent hours at a time trying to transcribe their data from paper to digital form. ButterflyNet definitely seems to ease the transition. However, I wonder if there will ever be significant developments in OCR to fully automate this process. The problem appears to be not in developing a special pen and paper for accomplishing these tasks, but more in developing OCR to make transcription simpler.
As with PADD, there is the concern of having to use a special pen and paper to accomplish daily tasks. If the pen gets lost, then the system essentially breaks down. I think that the important concern is to improve OCR such that it is possible to work with the current technology that we have available.
Tom McClure - Sep 06, 2006 12:33:27 pm
Wired - One wonders, given the date of the article (and the level of hype), why we are not all customers of anoto here in 2006. What went wrong? What is the fatal flaw with this technology? My first reaction was that the need to print UV dots on the paper kills this tech dead in its tracks. It needs to work in a paper-neutral setting for it to really take off. Also, absolute paper space governed by a centrally controlled directory sounds more like a dream of some suit that wants to license the air we breathe rather than an inspired technology that solves any real problem.
PADD - This article made me even more critical of the Anoto technology's dependence on special paper. Much of the article was devoted to discussion of how to make the technology function in a real application, and documented having to overcome trouble with registration (ie making stuff line up), trouble with ink opacity, etc.
ButterflyNet - The design process is nothing without great ideas. Here the marriage of great ideas to a very disciplined adherence to the design process produced a product that the testers needed and wanted. Instead of completely abandoning current workflow and practices, the authors' approach of augmenting notebook use with smart, automated collaboration technology really works.
Dexter Lau - Sep 06, 2006 11:52:09 am
Hot New Medium I found the Ericsson relationship to be one of the most interesting topics discussed in this reading. Having Ericsson buy 15% of Anoto and then having the ability to purchase another 15% is a pretty big indicator that this idea has buyers and larger backers -- people really believe that Anoto can work. And by having Ericsson, which is a big Bluetooth technology proponent, Anoto has a strong platform to launch from.
PADDs Effective OCR is a big selling point for Anoto (although Anoto does not support it, having someone that does would be a killer app). This is a pretty big hurdle to overcome in order to have the physical and electronic documents to coexist and be distributed easily. Moving large PDFs around seems like an idea, but the flexibility of the content would be very low.
ButterflyNet This is a great example of open source software taking advantage of Anoto's capabilities. Lugging a laptop on the field, which may well be raining, is very inconvenient. By replacing the laptop with a simple camera, pen, and notebook, communicating research can be magnified dramatically. Having everything digitized quickly and seamlessly allows researches to share their work instanteously and effortlessly.
Jason Lee- Sep 06, 2006 12:31:25 pm
Wired: This article shed a bit more light on the way the Anoto Digital Pen worked and brought up some interesting ideas and applications, many of which were already mentioned and demonstrated in the promotion video. Though some people saw it as a disadvantage, I actually was swayed by the argument that the pen doesn't understand language, as it allows for a wider array of characters, symbols, and drawings to be transmitted. However, I wasn't convinced by the vision of having online forms in paper format that submitted when you checked a certain box on the paper. 5 years later, we can see that such visions haven't come true as of yet.
PADD: I agree with those who have said that this particular technology has a certain amount of redundancy to it. There really seems to be no reason to print out one draft of it and then create digital marks on the same copy of it. In addition, as many have mentioned, Tablet PC technology really makes something like this somewhat redundant or obsolete.
ButterflyNet: Interestingly, the thing that most struck me about the article was that it mentioned the "graceful degradation" of the pen, in which if the digital lens of the pen failed, a hard copy (ink) would still exist. Though the Wired article mentioned that the ink aspect of the pen was merely for "comfort and familiarity", this is actually an important point, as it is easy for digital information to be corrupted in some form, and having a hard copy available is important for archiving purposes.
Siu Pang Chu - Sep 06, 2006 12:52:25 pm
The Hot New Medium : the article gave a clearly described the Anoto Pen. It tells how the paper and the pen works, and who is their target consumer. In the article, it mentioned many interesting area that the pen can be used, like “imagine putting a check mark in the newspaper to program your VCR.” However, I really worried about the medium for this pen so limited by the paper. Into to fulfill the requirement, the newspaper then has to be printed with dots? Another problem with Anoto Pen is the Price, as I checked from Amazon.com , Anoto Pen around $140 and plus the paper. If I am the user, I will prefer to buy a palm because of two reasons: 1. just a few $$ more palm can provide much more functions, like internet, mp3... 2. I will not pay $100+ to test a unknown new product which has the similar function as the old one Palm.
ButterflyNet: It’s target is specifically aimed to Biologists. One important area of this program is put all kind of data together, pictures, handwriting and tables. As the result showed in fig 8, it can increase the current field time for all three case which is good. If the Butterfly net can connect to a online database that will be better, so the Biologists can know whether is a new species anytime.
PADD: the conversion between digital world and paper world have being a big problem . However, I didn't see this paper mention any new technology or hardware that can give a break thought in this problem. One interesting point in the paper is the Stroke collector, which first look up the annotations on each page. Then, uses this data “to retrieve the proper stroke file from the central repository maintained by the io pen system." It seems to be a good way .
Anton Mikhailov - Sep 06, 2006 11:51:12 pm
Hot New Medium: As stated by another comment above, I feel that the usefullness of this is a bit exaggerated. To me, this still seems like a neat "trick". Its main target would seem to be people who are used to pen and paper and cannot use a computer efficiently. Still, many portable uses are very viable but an entire human/computer interface promise is a bit farfetched. The pen will need much more real time feedback (visual and audio) in order to make for an interactive tool.
ButterflyNet: I was somewhat put off by the large tool the biologists have to carry in order to insert pictures into their text. This hotspot designator seems to be a step back to what they were trying to acomplish. The system must be portable and simple, and adding an entire camera-sized piece to it is bad design. There must be a cleaner way to specify on the piece of paper using the anoto pen where the things will go, without the attachment. It may require an extra variable (such as naming the picture so it can later be inserted) but since we are handwriting all this in, I believe its quicker and more reliable than using the attachment.
PADD: Although a good idea, I find that going from computer to paper to computer seems to be a bit redundant. This is the sort of task that Tablet PC would excel at. It is true that I like (I'm guessing) most people would prefer to anotate on live paper, but the disadvantage of priting the document out first greatly outweighs this need. If I have to anotate 50+ pages, thats not only a noticable cost (in both material and time), but also a huge waste since all the notes will be digitized and never used again. I can see cases where the notes would be possible to reuse and add more comments to, but in most cases, you dont alter your annotations, and this seems a big price to pay for convinience. Of course, for small tasks like grading (as demonstrated) this may be usable, but really, most cases you get a few errors and you can just stop being lazy and fix them on the computer. If you have so many errors that it would be more efficient to digitize them in, you should probably consider rewriting the paper anyway...
Ani - Xerox reveals transient documents
Hello,
This article has been floating around on Slashdot and similar sites. Thought it might be interesting in the context of our class:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/93305/xerox-reveals-transient-documents.html
Re: I had actually seen one of these printer at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC) this summer. Apparently, it had been more or less ready for production well over a year ago. The main reason for the delay was that a large portion of the Xerox revenue came from printer cartridge sales and this new breed of printers would be presumably be cartridge-less. This goes to show that sometimes market success for a good piece of design or engineering work depends on other outside factors, e.g. politics, culture, market.
-David S.
Charles Lee - Sep 10, 2006 11:03:10 pm
The Hot New Medium 1:
It strikes me that Anoto's business plan is to milk patents off of their idea after a proof of concept. They have a many great ideas, but would probably benefit more from focusing on a few markets at a time. An optical reader is not patented, and a different format (or improvement) of the dot-paper could leave them with a patent on an inferior product. As well, they are not selling their own paper, nor intend to even produce their own pens (Pilot and Montblanc might produce the pens). This bets everything on favorable reception from partner companies that have no reason to cooperate. Competing formats could sink their efforts, similar to Betamax vs. VHS, or BluRay vs. HD-DVD.
The Hot New Medium 2:
Digital paper seems like a huge barrier to using the pens. Without digital paper, the pens are worthless, and this digital paper is an expensive thing to buy or create/sell. On top of that, wireless/Bluetooth receivers would have to be omnipresent for the pens to be much more convenient than PDA's or cell phones, which are already available in the market. It would take a few large partnerships and a huge marketing project to initiate deployment of these pens, and even so, these pens may be ahead of their time.
PADD 1:
This idea appears to surpass the Anoto pen's immediate feasibility by far. Having the paper medium be cheaply printable retains benefits of paper even the Anoto article mentions: plentiful and costs 1/2 a cent. As well, the usage of the PADD would be extremely similar to existing usage, allowing more seamless transition for even technically illiterate users.
PADD 2:
Although this implementation is much more feasible, it is also much more mundane. Copyediting is a very limited application, and without ubiquitous streaming feedback, is quite similar in effect to a cheap scanner with OCR software. However, this is a fine example of how fragile Anoto's marketshare is. Competitors can implement similar ideas with overlapping applications, severely hurting Anoto's survivability, much less dominance.
ButterflyNet 1:
This article gives an interesting example of an application of the Anoto pen (or other penstroke capture devices): automatically creating a second copy of data as it is being written, in case one of the copies is lost or damaged. I question how many use cases require instant backups at all times, but at least the biological field study case works.
ButterflyNet 2:
This was a good example of several useful features in the pen, including timestamp of strokes and database storage. Also, it appears that a large amount of interesting applications are related to picture or character recognition. This seems more directly relevant to recognition topics than pen and paper topics, and many of these gains could be gotten from scanning pages of notes into the recognition programs as well.
Heng Kuang - Sep 13, 2006 10:26:52 am
The Hot New Medium: Paper
Quoted from the article: "Right now, we're all trying to synchronize Palms, phones, Outlook, day planners…It's almost seamless now…”. It is interesting to see that five years ago, when the article was written, Google wasn’t a part of the competition in planners. More interestingly, in terms of synchronization, Google allow import from many different resources as long as the other calendars can be exported to iCAL or CSV files. However, it doesn’t support exporting, nor does it support sync between gcal and other calendars (such as outlook). That is, once you decide to use gcal, you have to stick with it. It seems to me, this is more of a business decision than a design decision. But of course, a business decision is still a part of a design decision.
Apart from Anoto’s claim of its rapid growing popularity that attacked by many in our class, I also find some of their other statements a bit over the top: “…the most advanced digital input screen ever developed…high resolution…perfect contrast…”. It is true that the size of the grids on the paper is capable of very high resolution, but the pen itself doesn’t seem capture the pressure on its tip very well. (i.e. With real pen and paper, we press harder to write thicker, darker lines.) The pen doesn’t seem to be very sensitive to such difference.
PADD
Like many others have commented, I agree that PADD is not a “full live cycle” as they claimed until OCR is mature enough to interpret hand written notes. Especially in the case of proof reading, what the mature need to understand is not only the added text, but also what does various notations mean. Until they figure out a reliable method to solve the problem, the proof reading application is not very efficient because someone will have to make the changes manually. By my understanding, Anoto only remembers the location of the pen stokes relative to the paper, instead of to the text. Therefore, I imagine without very careful calibration of the printer, PADD might not work very well. What if the digital copy is reformatted after it is printed? Would the current PADD be smart enough to carry over the changes?
In what format is the modified digital copies save in? I imagine the whole page is saved as an image. If so, editing the file manually will still require moving between two windows, the one containing he image and the one containing the actually text file. Personally, I think that is more painful than working between a paper copy and a computer screen.
I don’t quite agree that paper is easier to navigate than computer. In the example of large printouts for architects, to find a certain spot on the print out might not be as easy. On a computer screen, zooming in and out is very easy. One can find a spot fairly quickly as long as he/she knows the approximate position of the spot.
ButterflyNet
This is my favorite article among the three, both in terms of contents and style. Compared to PADD, ButterflyNet describes their design in concrete details with easy to follow steps. Most of these steps seem quite doable. They also evaluate their works quite honestly, presenting success and admitting flaws. They documented their motivation, observation, design concepts, implementation methods and evaluation process in a very organized way, which can serve as a very useful reference for future researchers.
I have also noticed that they often use italic to stress on important ideas. Although it is such a simple thing to do, it is not very practice by every author. This is definitely an example of good UI design. It helps the readers to pay attention to important ideas. It also makes it easier to go back and skim the article without missing major ideas.
Cheng-Lun Yang - Dec 06, 2006 11:36:20 pm
The Hot New Medium: Paper
1. In the reading, the founder of Anoto company believes that paper is the most successful screen user interface ever designed. It is true that papers are cheap and easy to produce. It is this feature that makes paper the most widely used media despite its relatively short life span.
2.The author of the reading believes that digital pen and paper will be widespread in the near future. However, after using the interface for the whole semester, I believe there are still many issues need to be solved for the technology to be realistically useful. The problem with the camera angle and the inability to erase a pen mark are just a few problems that lay ahead for the designers to think about.
PADD
1.Personally, I prefer reading on printed paper over reading on the monitor screen. The situation described in the reading happens to me when I have to proofread my essay. I have to read on the paper and find the corresponding page on the computer to change what I want. The extra step needed is just what the PADD is designed for.
2.At the end of the reading, the author discussed the possibility of paperless office. I agree with what the author said in that papers will not be displaced anytime soon. Paper has been used for thousands of years comparing to just less than one century for computers. It will take a lot of effort to change people’s behavior to totally replace paper interface.
Butterflynet
1.The idea of butterflyNet is interesting. However, as I was reading through the procedures of different functions, I had trouble memorizing all the different ways to use them. Maybe it is more intuitive to the people in the target group to use the features.
2.The butterflyNet is a good idea that is specific to one task just like our group project, Melody. However, one thing to pay attention is that when the biologists are on the field, they usually do not write on a flat surface. The pen will have to be able to read the correct coordinates in order to be useful.
Robin Franco - Dec 15, 2006 10:25:49 am
The Hot New Medium 1: I found this to be a very interesting article. The fact that it was written over five years ago makes me read it with a slight smirk. There was so much hype that went into the initial product release, but what happened? At this point, the only real use of this technology I've seen is Leapfrog's toy. For a technology to truly have an impact on society, it has to extend beyond being a simple toy.
The Hot New Medium 2: The problem I see with the Anoto pens we used in class was that they require you to connect to a computer. If they can create a pen that has an easily-programmed, on-board computer, then I believe it will be a much more useful tool.
PADD 1: The aspect of proof-reading on paper is something that I personally like. As much as I enjoy using my computer, when it comes time to proof read, I think the best process is to print it out and manually go over the paper. There are many errors I find that I would have otherwise skipped over on a computer screen.
PADD 2: Simplicity is king, in my opinion. If a new idea is better, but more complicated, I think it makes its adoption more difficult. Look at the iPod, for example. It lacks many of the features provided by other MP3 players, namely, it has no FM radio. However, the iPod is hugely popular. Why? Because of its simplicity. Likewise, this system, although an improvement over what is currently used, is too complicated to warrant wide-spread adoption.
Butterflynet 1: I think the system described in this article is a good example of a simple improvement on a previous design. A real need is being addressed with the use of these Anoto pens.
Butterflynet 2: One of the difficulties in the adoption of a new technology is fear. Many are not convinced as to the reliability of this new innovation. When computers started becoming more popular for typing up papers and essays, I remember that were many questions such as “what happens if the electricity goes out?” This is of course a problem, but so rare that the fact that someone would worry about it just goes to demonstrate the fear in adopting new technology. How is this problem addressed? By “graceful degradation” as the article mentions. With this, a user is much more likely to make the jump to a new technology.
