[quote=CDMA ENG]Dude that light scribe is TOTAL MONEY!
Man, find one person with excellent hand writing skills and you could sell the notes out of the class for good bucks!
At least that is what I would have done in Engineering College…
We would always ask the person with the best hand writing for a copy of his notes if we had a heavy schedule and could not attend.
CE[/quote]
The first generation pens were Java J2ME based. I bought one when they demoed it at JavaOne.
The technology is based on how optical mouses work. You write on special paper called “microdots”, which has a bunch of dots you can barely see. An optical sensor in the pen captures the movement across patterns and stores the pattern, along with information about the the page you are writing on (a page is encode with information about the page number, the specific notebook you are writing in). Then you plug the pen into a usb cradle and sync the data to your pc.
The software on the pc
1)Animates the penstroke you wrote in the notebook, and
2) plays any recorded audio at the time of writing. This is definitely much better than just taking notes because often one forgets what was being discussed when the notes were being written. This device keeps the context.
3)You can upload the writing and audio to livescribe online, and share the contents with other people. For example, sharing notes with your friends.
There are some improvements which I wish they had included in the first gen devices…
1) The optical char recognition software wasn’t as easy to write stuff on
2) I wish they used something like Bluetooth instead of using a traditional USB cradle to sync with a computer.
There were a lot of interesting apps one could write related to legal/finance. Some of which was/is patentable.
The biggest drawback is you have to buy the special notebook/paper, which isn’t cheap… In theory, you could make a photocopy of the notebook, and reuse the same paper over and over again… At one point, livescribe also mentioned they would include the ability to print your own paper. Not sure if that ever happened.
