Tuhi Is A New Project To Support Wacom SmartPads On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Tuhi Is A New Project To Support Wacom SmartPads On Linux

Tuhi is a new open-source project started by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoires to support Wacom SmartPad devices on Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Tuhi-Wacom-SmartPad

[mitcoes]

I've read Wacom now ask for a 3 USD / month subscription for making it fully work, if this drivers, also come with the ability to use it with FOSS OCR, and image processing software, it would be great.

[schmidtbag]

Interesting - I never knew this product existed in the first place. I imagine reverse engineering the drivers to read from hardware likely isn't that hard. I figure the real challenge will be the precision and noise calculation, depending how the sensor works anyway.

[starshipeleven]

I wonder who buys such a thing to write his shopping list, what is the marketing department on?

[schmidtbag]

I wonder who buys such a thing to write his shopping list, what is the marketing department on?

Based on the photos I've seen, shopping lists were pretty much the only example they didn't have. It's more geared toward note takers, people who like to draw with pens (rather than pencils), and maybe rough draft sketches for graphic designers who prefer real paper.

[DrYak]

depending how the sensor works anyway.

I've used to look at an older cousin of the same technology, sold by Lotigech under the io Digitel Pen name.
That pen, according to wikipedia uses the same Anoto pattern system as the Wacom.

Basically, it doesn't work with any random bloc of paper. You need to use a special paper, that is covered with an almost invisible pattern of dots (good business plan : the company profits by selling the consumable).
The pen has a miniature camera (a bit like a mouse).

The pen can guess a very precise absolute position (page number and position inside the sheet) based on the pattern it sees (the pattern encode coordinate in a giant virtual plane. Each page in bloc of paper is a different rectangular subset of that giant space).
(Imagine a grid paper with each cell in the grid containing a QR-code, each QR-code encoding 2D coordinates - so a smartphone could immediately know which position it is facing, - and consecutive sheets of paper encoding adjacent coordinates . Except that instead of obnoxious QR-code you use things which are closed to printers' yellow-dots patterns in terms of discretion).

Even more precision coudl be obtained by tracking the apparent motion of the dots.

So basically the traces produced are potentially extremely precise and won't need much denoising.

But on the other hand it requires special paper. You cannot use generic paper.

So such device cannot be used to take informations out of an exam room that requires you to destroy the provided notes/scribling paper (which was the original idea of use for which I did investigate it).

[starshipeleven]

Based on the photos I've seen, shopping lists were pretty much the only example they didn't have.

Mh, translation issue on my side.
The second image in the article is a list of notes for a stereotypical work meeting, which are more or less the same thing as a shopping list, but in a work environment. I've seen that called "shopping list", informally.

I don't see this becoming a thing outside of very nerdy places, replacing pen and paper for such types of things is going to be very hard. Only if Apple spearheads this I see some chances.

[DrYak]

(Basically it's a GPS system for paper :-P )

[grok]

The ancestor might be the 1980s optical mouse with special mouse pad?

Interesting - I never knew this product existed in the first place. I imagine reverse engineering the drivers to read from hardware likely isn't that hard. I figure the real challenge will be the precision and noise calculation, depending how the sensor works anyway.

There might be some processing in the pen, like a DSP or artificial retina.

One use case would be doing math. Imagine all the data savings and better quality from not scanning square meters of empty paper and its dust and wrinkles. Being able to store all the notes on SSD and even search them, if only by using weak "AI" that will match scribbles with those in the entire library.