At the University of Lugano, faculty of Informatics, we just had a nice talk about pen and paper computing, by Nadir Weibel. An ETH gradate, he’s currently a post-doc at UCSD in California, at the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Lab.It seems a great place to be for Human computer Interaction research, experimenting on innovative input devices.
He used his digital pen and interactive paper for giving his presentation and brought a few samples for the audience. They are inventing/testing new applications of the electronic paper: you write with a normal pen (well, it looks normal, but it has a camera and sends the information to the computer or to the mobile) and your writing or drawing is recorded and/or sent to the computer, depending on the model of digital pen you have.
They use it for example for sharing sketches via mobile on fecebook, as an input device for very large wall displays, for interacting in a group, etc.
I could imagine to use it in a collaborative setting, where every person in the meeting can add its contribution… but still my sketching skills are a problem 😉
Sabrina Bresciani, Ph.D. 