What if you had a pen that writes by it self. It would be really nice, all you’d have to do is to type a text on the computer and the pen would hand-write it for you. Children in school could watch a live demo on writing lessons, not just a simulation software.
For a few days I’ve been playing with a haptic pen. The device sends to a computer the coordinates where the user puts it. Moreover, it can generate some force feedback. Usually devices like this are used for interacting with virtual spaces. The specialists at IRIT(Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) Toulouse, the institute where I currently practice thought of doing the reverse.Using an earlier IRIT written software, that generates hand writing, we succeeded to move the pen in order to make it do something that only humans used to do before: hand-write.
How did we do that? We glued a pen to the arm of the haptic device (tape was an excellent solution), we placed a paper underneath it, and voilla.
PenMover (IRIT’s program for simulating hand writing)
SimWrite (the program that moves the pen)
