Interactive Paper
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Prof. Dr. Beat Signer
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Department of Computer Science
Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels
(Belgium)
+32 2 629 1239, bsigner@vub.be
Office: PL9.3.60 (Pleinlaan 9)
VUB
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Interactive Paper

Digital pen technologies bridge the paper-digital divide by enabling user actions on paper to be tracked. Handwritten notes and sketches can be digitally captured. Active areas on paper can be defined that link to digital content and services and users activate them by simply touching them with the pen. Possibilities abound for publishing new forms of interactive documents and providing paper-based interfaces to applications.
Interactive Paper user
Fig. 1: Interactive Paper user
The Global Information Systems (GlobIS) research group at ETH Zurich has developed a platform and range of tools to support the rapid prototyping and production of all kinds of interactive paper applications.

iPaper

iPaper is a framework that supports the rapid development and deployment of interactive paper applications (e.g. for scientific annotations ). Active areas can be defined on paper and linked to various forms of digital media and services. By providing an extensive library of active components, users can rapidly develop a wide range of applications without having to do any programming. iPaper was developed as a component of iServer, a general cross-media server, which means that active areas can be linked to and from a wide range of physical and digital media including web pages, images, video, flash animations, databases and RFID tags as well as application programs.

iGesture

iGesture is a general and extensible framework to support the development and deployment of gesture recognition algorithms. The API makes it simple for application developers to define their own gesture-based interfaces. It is device independent and can be used with a mouse, tablet or digital pen as input.

Authoring and Publishing Tools

Interactive applications are developed by authoring active areas within pages and defining links to digital content and services. Depending on whether the application is a simple paper-based form interface to an existing application or a large-scale cross-media publication, different styles of authoring and publishing are appropriate. We therefore have developed a suite of tools that include support for everything from the manual authoring of active areas and links to full-scale publishing tools that automatically generate printable versions of documents and link definitions based either on a semantic analysis of existing PDF documents or a content publishing approach.

Technologies for Interactive Paper

There are numerous research projects and commercial products related to interactive paper and while they tend to vary widely in terms of their goals and technologies, most are based on some means of detecting user actions on paper documents and linking them to actions in the digital world. If paper documents are to be interactive independent of their physical position or attachment to a special device, then the mechanism for detecting user actions on paper must rely on some sort of encoding of information on the paper itself. One approach is to print some sort of link identifier on the paper. For example, barcodes or special icons could be used to encode unique identifiers that are mapped to digital media files or web pages to be displayed. Another approach is to encode position information across pages which can be used to track pen position. The advantage of this approach is that is can be used to capture writing as well as for interaction. Further, since links are based on relative position within a document rather than simple identifiers, it is possible to find all the elements within a document that link to a specific target.
Digital Pen
Fig. 2: Digital Pen
The Swedish company Anoto developed a technology to track the movement of a pen on paper to enable the capture of handwriting. A special digital pen has a camera situated alongside the writing stylus to capture images of an almost invisible pattern of infrared absorbing dots printed on paper, as indicated in the Fig. 3. The pattern of dots encodes (x,y) positions in a vast virtual document space. Camera images are recorded and processed in real-time giving up to 100 (x,y) positions per second. Several pages of handwriting can be captured and stored within the pen before being transmitted to a PC. While data transmission on demand is sufficient for writing capture, immediate transfer of position data is required if the digital pen is to be used as an interaction device.
Anoto paper
Fig. 3: Anoto paper
Other projects investigated alternative technologies to yield a low-cost solution for interaction only. Within the previous European project Paper++, a grid of almost invisible barcodes printed in conductive ink was used to encode position information on paper and a prototype reader was developed to read position information by measuring the inductivity during a swiping action. Other solutions have been investigated in the European PaperWorks project.

Related Publications

  • 2024

  • thumb Pen-based Interaction, , Handbook of Human Computer Interaction, Major Reference Work, Springer Nature, 2024 (to appear)
    Available:  document

  • 2021

  • 2019

  • 2017

  • 2014

  • 2011

  • 2010

  • 2008

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  • 2006

  • thumb Putting Location-based Services on the Map, , , and , Proceedings of W2GIS 2006, 6th International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems, Hong Kong, China, December 2006
    Available:  document external digital library
  • thumb General Framework for the Rapid Development of Interactive Paper Applications, , and , CoPADD 2006, 1st International Workshop on Collaborating over Paper and Digital Documents, Banff, Canada, November 2006
    Available:  document presentation
  • thumb Print-n-Link: Weaving the Paper Web, , and , Proceedings of DocEng 2006, ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 2006 (acceptance rate: 33%)
    Available:  document ACM digital library presentation
  • thumb Paper-based Mobile Access to Databases, , , , , and , Demo Proceedings of SIGMOD 2006, ACM International Conference on Management of Data, Chicago, USA, June 2006
    Available:  document ACM digital library

  • 2005

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  • 2001