Future Technology
Are digital pens something to write home about?
After 5,000 years of leisurely evolution, the pen is about to
go digital -- but has it missed the boat? DCLnews reports

OVER THE PAST 5,000 years, the evolution of the pen has taken a remarkably leisurely pace. It has gone from sharpened sticks scraping cuneiform on tablets of Sumerian clay to become, in turn, a quill, fountain pen, ball-point, felt nib, and currently, the ink-gel pen. The most significant innovations in the development of the pen have been the addition of ink and the refinement of the nib.

But now plans are afoot to overhaul the humble writing instrument completely and turn it into a wireless digital device that converts the written word from ink on paper to digits that can be transmitted by a mobile phone or stored on a personal computer or network.

Getting words from paper to a network or PC, however, is no easy matter. First, the digital pen has to sense what is being written, convert it from graphical form into text, and then beam it to a nearby device for storage or transmission via the Internet.

Patterns on paper
Three approaches to this have emerged in different parts of the world. Swedish company Anoto has developed a digital pen that writes on special paper ingrained with a pattern of invisible-to-the-eye dots -- known as the "Anoto pattern." The digital pen has a built-in camera that scans the path the tip of the pen takes over the Anoto pattern.

The special paper is like an "intelligent map". One area of it can be used for making notes, another for ticking a box that says "Send this note as e-mail," or still another saying "Send this note as a fax."

Anoto's pen has been chosen by mobile phone company Ericsson for the "Chatpen," which will send data to mobile devices using a Bluetooth wireless chip, and is due out in coming months.

Anoto has also forged alliances with various paper and stationery companies, including Filofax and Mead Corporation, two makers of pocket organizers and desk planners. Each day in a diary or calendar will be ingrained with the Anoto pattern, so that an Anoto pen and its associated software can process the scheduling and reminders electronically.

In the future, companies may be able to license segments of the Anoto pattern to use in their print advertising. Consumers would then be able to look at adverts in newspapers or magazines and tick Anoto-patterned boxes that say "Buy this" or "Send more information."

Conventional notepad to PC
Anoto's rivals, however, don't use special paper. In America, Digital Ink of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is developing a digital pen called N-Scribe, which uses an on-board infra-red transmitter along with what they dub "triangulation" technology. Triangulation is designed to be embedded in mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and PCs, so that they can process what an N-Scribe user is writing on a conventional notepad nearby. Like Anoto, future versions of N-Scribe may use Bluetooth or other wireless technologies.

Meanwhile, OTM Technologies of Herzliya in Israel is working on a standalone system, called the "v-Pen," which shines laser beams on to the writing surface and analyzes how movements of the pen affect the reflected wavelengths. The company hopes to use its v-Pen tracking technology to form the basis of a series of products made by partners rather than by the firm itself.

The technology used in the pen -- optical translation measurement -- is based on a classic Michelson interferometer developed in the 1880s to detect the mysterious "universal ether" that scientists then believed to be the carrier of light waves. With a minute interferometer placed close to its writing tip, the v-Pen is sensitive enough to analyze the Doppler shifts (i.e, changes caused by movement) in the writing surface as the pen sweeps across it (even the back of a hand can be used as a writing surface). The pen's software then recognizes the letters being formed and turns them into a stream of digital information.

Pen vs. mouse
OTM Technologies see the v-Pen as less a pen than an all-around input device that can be used to navigate menus or play games on PCs or other mobile devices. Like his rivals, the company's chief executive officer, Gilad Lederer, believes that the new generation of wireless digital pens will overcome the skepticism engendered by earlier attempts to capture writing digitally. "It might take ten years," he says, "but speech and handwriting are the most natural ways for people to interact."

Speech, yes. But the future of handwriting is more debatable. With children now learning to use computers before they even tackle handwriting, there is a possibility that the pen might become an unnatural way to create text.

Saying that, it is hard to imagine how the convenience and portability of the pen could be bettered. Stuff a pen and notebook in your pocket and you can write a novel in a cafe or in the middle of a desert. The same is true of digital pens -- although you would need to carry a mobile phone to transmit the data to a storage device for processing later. In the future, though, it might be possible to store gigabytes' worth of text and image data in the pen itself. A development like that could see the (not so humble) pen living on for a further 5,000 years...

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