Scenario 1: A hospital ward where doctors are busy doing rounds, moving from ward to ward and patient to patient, making notes on some, checking records of others. They have to keep records of each new patient and need to update the databases for the existing ones. They require a computer with wireless connectivity to the database. The computer should be light enough to carry and convenient enough for note taking and viewing patient records. Today's laptops are bulky and it is impossible to enter data while standing or walking due to the input devices.
Scenario 2: A building is under construction and the engineers need to constantly carry a huge amount of data regarding the building with them - the plans, the structural designs, etc., which is considerable amount of paper. Any structural changes proposed has to be recorded and the designs have to be remade. What they need is a lightweight, portable, wireless computer which can be carried on site and changes to the designs can be directly entered (with something like a pencil) into the design software to find out if the changes would be feasible. It is not be possible to handle laptops and notebooks at construction sites and they often do not offer the flexibility of using a pen input.
Scenario 3: A student going to school is a common enough sight in every country, and carrying a load of books is painfully common too. A visit to the library for reference material makes the pile of books even larger. What the student needs is a computer so light that he can carry it around and connect to the database of the school library to access books. Submitting his work would be as simple as connecting his computer to that of the teacher's. The ideal device would be a computer that is as easy to use as a slate and would behave like a never ending notebook.
These scenarios and similar ones bring out the need for a very light slate-like mobile computer. In order to make it lightweight and portable, many new features had to be introduced and others done away with. The traditional input devices like the mouse and keyboard are not only bulky but also pose problems to designers and architects by hindering free thought and expecting them to learn how to use these devices for drawing or writing. A very natural answer would be to use a 'pen on paper' like input device where the onus of understanding and converting human handwriting into computer readable form would be entirely on the computer.
Pen computing is the interaction with a computer using a pen or a finger and a touch sensitive display. As computers and other digital devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs, e. g., the PalmPilot or Apple's Newton) are getting smaller and smaller, the 'traditional' input devices (mouse and keyboard) are no longer appropriate if the computer has to be carried around. In addition, pen computing provides a more natural and flexible interface for many applications, e. g., digital meeting support tools like electronic whiteboards. To provide the ability to recognize pen input, a specific hardware is needed which tracks pen movements on a screen. The input events which are generated by the hardware must be processed by an appropriate software. Here, it is important that the pen is not just a simple replacement for a mouse, which wouldn't yield an ergonomic user interface. A proper pen-based user interface should be provided.
A pen-based user interface provides on the one hand the possibility to enter hand-written text which is recognized or stored as free hand annotations. In addition most pen-based operating systems provide special shortcuts to execute functions (similar to clicking on a menu item) called ``gestures''. Gestures are special symbols which are recognized by the software if they are drawn on the screen. This could be a mirrored ``L'' to start a new paragraph or the letter ``B'' within a circle to set the text writing mode to bold.
Origin
The first computer scientist who wrote down the vision of a computer that could be used effortlessly by untrained users was Alan Kay. In 1968, he envisioned the Dynabook, and created a cardboard model of the same. The 'Dynabook' was a light-weight device on which one could take notes and work interactively with wireless communications. A prototype similar to the Dynabook was presented by Apple in 1987: the Knowledge Navigator, which included the book design of the Dynabook and added speech recognition and intelligent information retrieval agents. The new addition in the family of the Knowledge Navigator, but a more realistic device, was presented in 1992 by ex-Apple boss John Sculley and he called it Newton. Pen computing is now a major part of Apple's personal interactive electronics department (PIE). There are many other people and places in the history of Pen Computing among which the most remarkable are Robert Carr and GO Corp., who developed PenPoint as the first pen-oriented operating system in 1990.
Inside Pen Computing
The recognition of handwritten text is an important requirement for Pen Computing. The technology remains work- in-progress even now since the best efforts are still not perfect. The ideal goal of designing a handwriting recognition method with 100% accuracy is illusionary, because even human beings are not able to recognize every handwritten text. There exist two broad categories of the methods used for this purpose:
: Building pen computing devices requires start
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