The Digital Stationery Consortium, Inc. (DSC) announced a new white paper, “New Business Opportunities Fueled by the Emerging Digital Stationery Market” that looks at the development of ‘digital ink’ and the the development of the universal digital ink framework WILL (Wacom Ink Layer Language) and how this will be used in AU, AR and VR. Supporters of the technology and members of the DSC include E Ink, Fujitsu Client Computing, Microsoft, Montblanc, Remarkable, Samsung, Staedtler and Terada Music.
The white paper was written by our friend and Display Daily contributor, Dr. Jon Peddie, who points out that WILL is an open multi-platform and universal solution that might be the equivalent of Ascii for computing and PDF for documents. A key step will be exploiting AI and semantics to put more meaning into handwritten notes and diagrams.
All pen solutions support x and y coordinates and a time stamp to show when the content was created, based on sampling the motion, but some stylii can also add data on pressure, pen orientation and tilt and also the rotation of the pen, which can be used to provide further information.
We reported in MDM on the Logitech virtual keyboard ( Logitech Reveals VR Keyboard Solution) and recognising notes in virtual environments is also important for VR and AR.
The WILL SDK has features for producing, manipulating and storing digital ink as well as rendering it, based on OpenGL. For example, the rendering engine can emulate text created with ink from a fountain pen. The SDK can also support signature functions, Natural Ink and Active Ink for the sharing of data.
The white paper can be downloaded from here (registration needed)
