Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Survey of Pen-and-Paper Computing
Over several decades, a large body of research has been established that focuses on
Pen-and-Paper Computing. This chapter reviews previous work of the field - both
from a technological and interface perspective - and discusses future directions of
research and development.
2.1 Technologies
Pen-and-Paper Interfaces require that the computer system be able to capture how a
user is interacting with physical documents in the real world. This capturing should
be robust and perform in real-time without requiring a complicated technological
setup or adding interactional overhead. Ideally, paper documents and interactions on
paper should be tracked without the need to modify them in any form. In this section,
we first discuss technologies for realizing input to a computer system: this includes
capturing contents of paper documents, identifying documents and tracking their
locations. We further present technologies that allow for capturing input that users
make on paper using their hands, fingers or pens. Finally, we briefly discuss how
computer output can be provided on paper, by using projection or by augmenting
paper with electronic components.
2.1.1 Digitizing Contents of Paper Documents
Even though increasingly more documents are available in an electronic form, there
are still documents that only exist on paper. Visual scanners allow us to digitize their
contents. A scanner captures a static image of a page's contents at a given point in
time. If an image contains text, optical character recognition (OCR) [119] can be
used to convert the graphical marks into a machine-readable symbolic representa-
tion.
