................................. To leave Commie, hyper to http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html .................................
Surely sendmail reeled when thusly spake [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > > > > so your ideal mouse is very nearly an electronic pen, sensitive to movements > > on the scale of pen movements. so its form factor is still way off. > > > > there's not really SO much crap inside a mouse nowadays eh ? why NOT make > > it more of a pen form factor ? HMMmmmm...??? > > yeah... and how about even a combination of a pda stylus and a mouse? > like, hold down a button and you can enter graffiti text with the pen > -mouse. release the button and you move the cursor with the pen-mouse. > wouldn't neccessarily replace keyboard in any way, except when using > a browser etc where only some minor text entry every now and then is > required, so it might me more comfortable to enter the text slowly > than to switch to the actual keyboard... > then again, what would a pen-shaped mouse look like so that it would be > relatively easy to grab when having to switch from keyboard? hey /. picked up on it, clearly they have lots of commie readers. they point to this article: http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=technologynews&StoryID=767024 here's all the interesting parts: Now a four-year-old Israeli start-up has won backing from several major computer and mobile equipment makers recently for a digital pen that could provide the long-sought after alternative to keyboards and mice in new electronics. OTM Technologies has lined up some heavy hitters -- Motorola, Siemens and Microsoft and yet-to-be-disclosed Asian electronics makers -- who plan to work on the development of the new technology. They will use the pen, actually a stylus with a tiny optical laser reader at its point, for use in upcoming products. "The virtual pen allows you do all the things you do with and a mouse and a keyboard and more," said Gilad Lederer, co-founder and chief executive of OTM, which is based near Tel Aviv. His company's expertise lies in designing the tiny optical light reader that can be fitted at the head of a pen. The technology is designed to work with handwriting recognition supplied by its partners, such as Microsoft. "What we are good at is the head of the pen," Lederer said. Laser-based pens have been around in primitive since the 1960s. Expensive, wired styluses have long been available for high-end graphic designers. But OTM's technology promises to offer a low-cost digital writing instru- ment to the masses. OTM's Virtual Pen, or "VPen," works on a variety of surfaces, from computer screen to paper, and even human skin. It offers freedom of hand motion, unlike a competing digital pen-and-paper combination from Anoto of Sweden which requires a special "electronic paper" to recognize the pen's movements. Due to the miniature size of its components and the low-power consumption of its tiny optical head, the OTM digital pen can be incorporated into handheld styluses alongside a regular ink-tip pen. But don't expect to find OTM's optical pen on sale as a stand-alone consumer product this Christmas. Chastened by earlier industry failures, OTM has embarked on a patient strategy of winning over the world's biggest mobile phone, handheld and consumer electronics makers first, allowing them to build the digital pen into a wide variety of products. That could create a far more ubiquitous presence for the pens, which could become a standard way for users to input data. Last month in Germany, Motorola Inc., the world's No. 2 mobile phone maker, showed its latest line of mobile phones working with a wireless OTM pen, the first writing instrument for cellphones to operate on so-called Bluetooth networks. Microsoft sees OTM's digital pen as a more intuitive way to enter data into handheld computers and mobile phones using its software. At the CeBIT trade show in Germany, Microsoft showed off a Compaq iPAQ handheld linked to an OTM digital pen.
