This, you might guess, is where the Montblanc Augmented Paper enters the picture. Of course, most clever pens don’t speak at all to the values of traditional craftsmanship nor do they make aesthetic gestures towards cultivating an individual style. LiveScribe has been successfully cultivating a loyal following of journalists and college students for many years with its clever pens that can save doodles and even simultaneously record sound. In the current case, real-world pens that can capture real-world notes and send them to a computer, tablet or smartphone screen are nothing new. Now, there is nothing inherently revolutionary about this, just as there was nothing truly special about Apple’s touchscreen mobiles when they came out. Well, with a dash of augmented reality, Montblanc is showing off an augmented notebook and pen set at IFA 2016 (it automatically digitizes handwritten notes) that has already won over a segment of the public. Handwriting is an art much loved at the German writing instruments and watchmaking firm Montblanc but it is a decidedly analog love affair in an increasingly digital milieu. We conducted a testing for Activity 1 at a primary school in Geneva on April 12th.What in the world is Augmented Paper and what does Montblanc have to do with it? Well, to begin with, let’s slow it down a little and go back to basics. There are two activities in this project, one aims at inference of area formula and the other is the warm-up exercise for activity 1. This project gives me an opportunity to enhance my knowledge in several fields. First, I explored 2D drawing libraries such as OpenGL, SDL, and AGG for better performance. Second, I studied communication design and interaction design concepts to design papers and consider their usability. Last but not lease, I learned the process of drawing animation which is now used in our application to facilitate visual understanding rather than static images for pedagogical purpose. The Lamp device facilitates the ability for students to interactive with the augmented paper with feedback. These activities apply augmented reality technology with paper on the Lamp device (see the left figure). In this project I worked with a PHD student in CRAFT to design and implement activities for area calculation in geometry teaching.

Augmented paper