weekend silliness: Livescribe
11 Oct
Heard of the Livescribe Pulse Pen? You buy special dot paper and the infrared camera on the pen tracks your writing motions, storing them in memory (1 or 2 GB) and, if you want, recording audio sync-ed to your writing which you can then play back through the built-in speaker or headphone jack simply by tapping on the words you wrote. You can then upload the written notes to your computer along with the sync-ed audio and there is a software that can transcribe your handwriting.
It’s clearly marketed toward college students and people who need to take notes at conferences or meetings, but I am so curious about this combo of technologies that the only reason I haven’t bought one is because it is only compatible with Intel Macs running OS 10.5.5+. Another thing I don’t understand is why there is still paper and ink in this equation. I suppose an electronic tablet version would be heavier, more breakable and be more expensive – on paper you don’t have to worry about a display. Maybe the point is to still have notebooks to flip through, or maybe they just want their users to keep buying consumables. Still, I’m really looking forward to seeing a less consumable-heavy version a some point, say in combination with LED printers and heat-erasable paper:
Could this change publishing? Instead of getting your magazine through the mail you just get a digital file and print on your own paper, then erase or keep it at will?
Another company is Paperium, which makes a Mac compatible digital pen but without the audio recording. Without it, I’m not sure why this is too different from a PDA or scanning your drawings or notes. The draw of the Pulse Pen is the synchronized data collection and playback when the data is not necessarily too related or fused to each other, as in video. You gotta wonder whether we’ll eventually come to a point in time where we can collect all sorts of data simulaneously to a tiny device. Just some food for thought.
