Hacker News Reader

Comment by orjan | Hacker News Reader

"we designed a special dotted paper pattern" - this sounds very much like what Anoto[1] does. [1] http://www.anoto.com/the-technology-1.aspx

View on HN

Wacom went the opposite way for obvious reasons - digital pen that works with any paper. Wacom Inkling, http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Inkling

neat idea, but this kills it for me:

>How accurate are the sketches?

In general, sketches with Inkling will be accurate to within approximately +/- 0.1 inches (+/- 2.5 mm) in the main drawing area of an A4 page, and within (approximately +/- 0.2 inches (+/- 5.0 mm) at the edges of the page.

2.5mm is quite a large fuzz factor. Enough to make me think this could be great for very-rough sketching / outlining of a design, but not enough for replacing scanning / doing (essentially) OCR.

(Not a referral link - just a video review by someone who bought it) http://www.amazon.com/review/R2M4YOUB8J3F84/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...

If you check out that review it shows that the product definitely needs to mature. I can't see the wacom one being used for professional purposes until they up the accuracy. I was going to buy one for my finance for her birthday (she has a cintiq but wanted something for the go) but decided it wasn't worth it.

On top of that inkling requires that device to help read from the paper which limits its usefulness some (for me at least).

Hopefully they improve on it because it's definitely an interesting approach to this problem.

Illuminating video. Thanks! That's pretty condemning, inaccurate enough that I won't even consider buying it :/ It's too bad, because otherwise Wacom seems to make good stuff.

I wonder if that's relative to a fixed position or to the previous point. Like, if you draw a large square, the final corner may not meet, but the lines won't have discontinuities or bumps in them.

Livescribe[1] is another example of a smartpen with dotted paper.

[1] http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/dotpaper.html

It looks like Evernote is just using the dots to help remove the skew caused by taking pictures of a curved page. Anoto, Livescribe, et al. use the dots to capture the handwriting as it is being written - so their dot patterns have to be unique across each page. The way Evernote is using the dots is much more akin to how Google de-warps the pages of books it scans.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...

You can see in the picture ( http://blog.evernote.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/moleskin... ) that the 'special' pattern is simply that all the lines are dotted (perhaps with ovals, or is that my imagination?). That's all that is needed, really, to find the skew of the paper.

Nope. Not even close. Anoto dot pattern is a special, unique to every page pattern that allows digitizing pens like the Livescribe to follow handwriting with their cameras.

The Moleskin/Evernote dot pattern is merely alignment marks to help unskew photos taken with the iPhone. Not sure why that's even necessary as many iPhone apps which take photos do this automatically.

Except it seems that the dot pattern for Evernote would have to be much larger. I'm a heavy user of Livescribe pens, which are built on Anoto's paper, but the dots are so small that it takes a very close look to even see them. In this case, the dots have to be large enough to be seen by the application when using a cell phone camera.

That said, nice to see they've eliminated the need for a special pen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com