This is a new product from Acer,a book-sized laptop/phone with Atom 230 and a Nvidia Ion graphics processor. The battery can last for 8 hours.

http://www.mobile-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=021002LG3B30

It is better to rename this future technology to be “Laser Virtual Tablet”. By 2025, the technology of digital graphic tablet will break the current physical limitation on size, weight and hard tactility by using laser projecting technique, which allows digital artists to carry, use and enjoy digital drawing more conveniently.

By 2009, each graphic tablet contains three parts: a tablet with USB wire, a pen like device with special sensitive lead inside, and a pen holder to protect the pen while it is not being hold by hand. After enlighten by the idea of Laser Virtual Keyboard developed around 2007(Power Positioning,2007), in 2015, the actual tablet, wire and pen holder will disappear, only the pen will be left, with an additional “pen cap”. This cap contains a tiny internal laser projector, memory program and can be connected to computer wirelessly. Users can put the pen in pocket and take it to anywhere instead of carrying the actual heavy tablet. When start drawing, they just need to put the pen cap on the desk or other still place and turn on the switch. It will execute two tasks. Firstly, projecting a visual canvas on the desk, the wall or any other smooth surface. The projecting angel and canvas size can be freely adjusted by users, images drawn by using the pen will also be projected on the canvas at the same time. Secondly, receiving and storing the data of the interaction between the pen and projected canvas. Basic software of pencil drawing and simple coloring is built inside the pen cap, which allows users to draw a draft images without the support of computer. However, When the pen cap is connected to the computer, more software can be used for further production for making detailed images and animation. It can also be connected to mobile phones, in order to help users sending the image directly to their friends and teammates, having discuss and more communication immediately. By 2025, when the internal memory is getting bigger inside of the pen cap, bigger painting software will be built in.

This technology is specially developed for digital artists and students who travel a lot but can not carry laptop and drawing pads with them all the time, and people who have passion or need to draw their new ideas, sketches in different place. Virtual tablet has the new affordance to achieve “mobile drawing”, with its smooth and tiny shape, size, and wider development to simulate real drawing which are listed below.

Drawing in the current observable universe is more interesting and fluid than drawing on the computer(Tardiff, 2008) Although the graphic tablets has been able to apply the function of pressure effect before 2009, the tactility between the pen lead and the tablet was still too hard to simulate the natural softness of drawing on paper. Virtual tablet has better tactility functions developed, and also , the projecting angel allows user not only draw on the desk ,but can also draw in easel position. Different ways of holding the pen can make the drawing more natural and free.

More over, the virtual tablet will breakthrough the limitation of “mouse clicking mode by using single hand”, users will be able to use both hands and make the drawing process more efficiency and real. Other than holding the pen and drawing in one hand, the other hand will take responsbility on adjusting canvas setting, mixing colors by touching a small transparent ,thin, wheel shaped pad beside the canvas. This technique is developed in 2020 as an additional product for the virtual tablet. Similar to the touch wheel of Ipod,this transparent wheel pad can be easily re-sticked on any flat surface by static, and it will receive the 360 degree action from human finger.

In 2011, more and more reports of increased health problem from digital graphic workers, such as cervical spondylosis by over repeating turning head between monitor and tablet, gives a big pressure impact to the tablet developers. Therefore, the main direction of graphic tablet development start turning onto “screen drawing”, which is focusing on combine monitor onto graphic tablet and apply pressure sensors and arrays onto them. But the cost is getting higher than regular tablet, it is heavier to carry and easy to break. The sales marketing is even worse than previous regular tablet, and is fallen into disuse in 2013. The technology of graphic tablet begins to move onto the track of virtual in 2015 and then get a wider and stronger satisfaction from the users.
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References:
Power Positioning. (2007). I-Tech Virtual Laser Keyboard. Retrieved April 4th, 2009, from http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/
Tardiff, M. (2008)Comment to Real Drawing v.s Digital Drawing, Retrieved April 4th ,2009, from http://blendfilmsinc.blogspot.com/2008/06/drawing-digital-vs-real-drawing.html   

The Technological Development of Graphics Tablet through History

Digital graphics tablets seem started existing only as a computer input device in post-industrial society, when the global development started being pushed by digital technology. In fact, it actually has a number of pre-existing technology which had made great effort to previous society.

Unfolding the essential feature of graphics tablet, its main basic concept is transferring free handwritten or drawn graphics directly from human’s physical action to another display output. In pre-industrial labor society, this concept was obviously applied by pens, pencils and other hand drawing tools. The quality of drawn lines can be controlled by applying different pressure, thickness of the lead top and thickness of the lead. Lead pencils were developed in 1795; in the early 1900s, English pencil makers began using a letter designation for varying harnesses. Softer leads were designated with ‘B’, harder leads with ‘H’(Martin, 1997).This helped users to define and draw different level of dark tones much easier and faster.

After the society was pushed into industrial, which is a new period of machine production instead of repeated simple labor production. More and more machines were developed for printing, copying and transferring visual information. Caselli produced the first Pantelegraph in 1860s, It allowed the writings and drawings to be recognized by recording the inked positions on axis, then transferred onto another station. (<Caselli´s pantélégraphe>, 2007, para.2) In 1888, the first electrical machine of Telautgraph was developed by Elisha Gray in America, which enables one to transmit instantaneously of his handwriting, signatures, sketches, and musical notations (“Electricity as an Artist” , 1983, para.35). This had made the transferring of graphics more helpful for commercial use, such as signatures on documents, become a main advantage for this machine.

In the beginning of post industrial society, when personal computing was more and more popularizing, digital tablets with pen-like devices started being developed as an efficient input instead of artificial drawing by mouse. The digitizing tablet is a flat surface, sometimes illuminated, that has a fine grid of horizontal and vertical wires embedded in it (McConnell, 2002, p.47, para2). By the mid-1970′s there were several technologies on the market for “digitizing tablets,” basically drafting tables that allowed a user to trace a drawing into a computer where the lines were stored as dataset (Thornburg, 2007, para.4). However, this was only for input simple handwritten lines, there still existed a far distance to simulate real drawing. Wacom company, founded in 1983, Japan, started bring the digital drawing technology more naturally. The famous Disney film <Beauty and the Beast>was produced by using Wacom tablet in 1990 (Wacom, 2007).

The accelerated production of digital drawing is directly affected by the widely using of animation media. This not only means the on-screen childish cartoons, but also animated digital effect for movie manufacture. The post-industrial animation is not drawn on individual pieces of paper anymore, the mainly process has been moved onto computers. Serious illustrating is very important for making the images accurate and nice in detail.

There were three big impacts between the digital graphics tablet technology and the society. The first impact was the popularization of Japanese animation, which has attracted huge numbers of young people to be interested in produce animation style drawing by themselves, especially in East Asia and North America; The second impact actually made those young people starting using digital tablet instead of drawing on paper, which is the stronger communication provided by Internet. The cheaper fees for renting on-line spaces and hosts, the easy to learn programming languages such as HTML and CSS, helped young people to build forums and personal web sites for showing and discussing in their own interested topics. Around 2004, it became a fashion for animation fans to draw on graphics tablets and upload their works on line. At the same time, “OEKAKI BBS” was developed from Japan, which allowed on line users to cooperate drawing together, the cute interface design such as color settings and brush textures helped making the interaction more enjoyable.

The third important impact is the wide application of Adobe Flash/ Macromedia Flash. Flash is the main application for create a broad range of animated content, which is cooperated with Wacom tablet technology. The popularity of the Flash format and the widespread availability of its browser “plug in”s have made Flash animation a standard feature on ambitious websites. (Caplin & Banks, 2003, p. 142) This totally connected the animation fans’ interests to commercial and career application.

In year 2008, hundreds of personal produced illustration books were sold on each seasonal Animation festivals hold in Japan, China, South Korea and North America. The high productivity was directly affect by the widely use of graphics tablets with graphics software. The top effect this technology has made to the society is, when it combines with public communication, it pushed the overall passion and quality in the field of digital illustration, media and animation. It gives opportunities to everyone to achieve their dreamed animation production. Because of the interactive feature of flash is very effective in public commercial use, it also pushed the business in media career onto a new higher peak.

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References:

Caplin, S, Banks, A & Holmes, N. (Ed). (2003). The complete guide to digital illustration, Waston-Guptill Publications.

McConnell, J.J. (2002). Interactive Input Devices. In McConnell, J.J. (Ed) Computer Graphics Companion (pp.47) Nature Publishing Group

Martin, D. (1997). Grading Pencils. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://www.pencilpages.com/articles/grades.htm

Caselli´s pantélégraphe. (2007). Caselli´s pantélégraphe. Retrieved March 11, 2009, from http://www.hffax.de/html/hauptteil_caselli.htm   

“Energy: It may sound silly, but metallised balloons could provide an unusually cheap and effective way to generate solar electricity”

From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13174508

Instead of using expesive solar cell, Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California, has come up with what it hopes will be a better, cheaper alternative: balloons.

CES is larger than party balloons, with water-cooled surfaces, and sold as $2 each.

This is an research study on mobile product, based on analyzing the effects mobile products had make on economy and social market  from previous time, reasonable predictions is given by the author.

quotations from the article:

Future Outlook

1. Converged Mobile Devices Will Keep the Mobile Phone Market Afloat

2. Mobile Phones in Emerging Markets Will Feel the Effects of an Economic Crisis

3. Apple iPhone Mobile Entertainment Fever Will Break

4. Mobile Applications Will Become Critical in Purchase Decisions in Enterprises and SMBs

5. Will Mobile Workers Be Ditching Desk Phones? Still Not There Yet, But Will Be Getting Closer

6. 3G Investment Will Continue to Rise and LTE Will Be Poised to Debut

7. WiMAX Will Become a Reality

8. U.S. Mobile Operators Will Shift Focus to 3G Mobile Broadband Following Europe’s Lead

9. Virtualization Software Will Become a Key Ingredient in the Mobile Software Stack

10. Judgment Day for Mobile VoIP Providers: Only the Strong Will Survive 2009

1. Judging from your experience in this collective project, what are the benefits and limitations of this form?
Benefits:
-Ideas are generated faster
-Individual work load is getting lighter.

Limitations:
-People got confused on clarify the topic.
-It was a bit hard to unify ideas.
-organizing.

Did this experiment work? (explain why or why not.)
It really worked and helped me feel and understand the positive and negatives of multiple participating.During the lab I was not only focus on my teamwork, but also observing other teams’ process(such as their talking , their confusion and decisions. This experiment lab made the class tempo much more lively, and also showed the issues of crowd sourcing. Such as organizing issues

How does this research project differ in form, style, breadth, depth and content from one you would have produced by yourself? Give specific examples.
The style, tones and opinions would be more unique in individual project. Collective projects is more objective but less focusing.but people can keep generating deeper content while reviewing others knowledge and experience. For example, while we were discussing about the difference between scales, I found it was very easier to get new ideas based on others idea, which can push the discussion into a deeper level.

In an other hand, it is harder to organize when compare to individual project. The best example is the mess on the white board. We signed up posting order on it by using different color of pens and different writing styles, which makes less hierarchy and make me feel “too busy”. From this I can guess that the final result of our class Wiki will be similar to the board – which contains different writing stlyes, less hierarchy and less unified tones.

the image shows a Max/MSP/Jitter project which use camera as an input, when capturing the movement of the people in front of the camera, the display output can be various on changing the ways to present color values.

reference:
http://www.maxmspjitter.com/

Digital drawing tablet is one of the daily necessary tools for contemporary digital graphical artists, who are working in the fields such as digital illustration, game design, animation, advertising and lots of other graphical media industry. As an input to the computer, it allows people to “draw directly into the computer”, which means recording the tracks of cursor’s movement onto the “canvas” of graphical software, instead of using mouse actions. It should not be defined only as a media infrastructure, but also a combination with personal technology, because it requires users to have more or less of basic drawing ability.

 
One digital drawing tablet contains two parts: an individual “pen”, and a “pad” with a USB wire which can be connected to the computer. Inside the pen there is a “lead” made of special conductive material, which can give signals to the sensors built inside the pad. Therefore, the pad will not be affect by other subjects like human fingers or normal pens. It can only capture the action of its special pen.

 
There are three kinds of pad with different functions: the basic regular one is solid without any additional assistant tool except simple buttons and signal light,Every point on the tablet maps to a point on your screen, so it’s a cinch to navigate user’s desktop (Wacom,para2) ; The second one has a layer of transparent material (either plastic or gel piece ) onto it, which is able to transfer the pushing power from the pen to the pad. This is specially for users who need to trace a photo or other pictures, to insert a photo or other sample picture between the pad and the transparent layer then trace it more accurately(Kolle, 2003); The third type of tablet pad is quite expensive, which is built on a flat monitor screen, to let users directly draw on the screen without watching the computer’s monitor. 

 Not only limited in digital graphical industry, drawing tablet and other similar tablet PC are widely used in  education. In fall of 2006, the College of Engineering started to require all 1,400 incoming freshmen student to study by using tablet technology; DePauw University offers dozens of courses each semester using pen-based technology to allow students collaborate their work on the shared learning system, especially on the subjects such as economics and graphical analysis(Prey, Reed & Berque, 2007). In  ZheJiang University of China, 2005, the tutorial video of Japanese language teaching required instructors to show the character writing by using digital tablet, which was directed projected onto the lecture screen.

  
The advantages on using digital tablet are highly recommended. Firstly, it saves process time, space and cost. Instead of scanning images from paper then spending lots of time on fixing the image quality, users can draw directly onto the software canvas by using tablet. This avoids the cost on purchasing scanners , huge amount of paper , pencils, different kind of brushes and other unnecessary materials, which also protects the eco-system. Secondly, it allows users edit the images more conveniently just by loading the same digital brush tool and redo,undo, resave the projects. It is much easier to interact with pen-like input device than using mouse cursor, which can reduce the stress on wrist and provides better usability. The function of brush pressure helps users to control every step of drawing in satisfied detail.

 
However, there still existed a few negative effects on using digital tablet from my personal experience. When it become habitual to rely on using digital drawing technology, some of people’s real drawing skills are getting degenerate. For example, the skills on using water color, painting and other physical experience will become rusty. Although it is easy to simulate water color or painting effect in some computer software, it does not help people to improve their real drawing skill. This may be reserved by other digital technology such as Internet Youttube, which allows people to upload their process of real drawing as a tutorial teaching.

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References:

  
Kolle, I.C(2003).Graphics Tablet Solutions,Muska & Lipman Publishing

Prey, J, C , Reed, R.H & Berque, D.A (2007) The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technology on Education, Purdue University Press

Wacom  (2009, January 31) Pen Tablet , Retrieved January 31,2009, from http://www.wacom.com/productinfo/index.php

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