fly fusion

i am looking into digital pens. they record the movements and then translate to digital. a concept which could potentially be the technology behind my final idea. this image shown below shows how the fly pen works.


when you write with the fly fusion pentop computer on FLY™ Paper, everything is automatically captured and digitized. you can then upload it to your pc and convert to text. touch your pentop computer to FLY Paper, and you can quiz yourself on history, get help with a quadratic equation, or even play your favorite MP3. and when you're ready for new software, simply connect to your pc again to purchase and download custom homework and gaming applications directly to your FLY fusion pentop computer.

livescribe has put a computer inside a plump ballpoint pen.


for more than two decades, the dream of controlling a computer with a pen has seduced and, more often than not, frustrated some of the biggest luminaries in the technology pantheon, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

this pen has created an ambitious new type of pen-based computer system that, if successful, could bridge the gap between paper and the digital world and perhaps even change the way millions of people interact with the internet.

“The challenge, like with all technologies, is to package it in a way that people will want to use”

instead of forcing users to write with a stylus on a computer’s slippery display, livescribe put the computer inside a plump ballpoint pen that is used on paper imprinted with nearly invisible miniature dots. as a user writes, a tiny camera near the pen’s tip watches those dots go by, recording what is being written.

mr. marggraff said calling it pen computing is a misnomer. “We are creating paper-based computing,” he said.

in addition to the camera, the pen, which is about the size and weight of a fat montblanc pen, has two microphones to record sound, a speaker for playback, a small display that mr. marggraff calls a pixel bar, and, of course, a hidden computer chip and other sophisticated electronics. It fits into a docking station, where it can upload or download programs and data files to and from a PC.

The Livescribe pen is a more advanced version of the LeapFrog Fly Pentop Computer, which itself has some impressive abilities, even if it is intended for children. Fly users can draw a calculator on paper and make it work by tapping the keys with the pen; a speaker in the pen plays back the results. Users can also draw a piano keyboard on a piece of paper and play a tune on it.

“Ironically, the big behavior change may be to get this younger generation to pick up this unfamiliar instrument called the pen.”