Pen controls presentations via Wi-Fi

Canson has announced plans to bring Mac support to its PaperShow presentation system. MacNN took a closer look at the hardware, which was on-hand this week at the Macworld 2010 expo. The package consists of a large pen that writes on the company's special paper. Information from the pen is then sent via Bluetooth to a USB dongle attached to the computer.

The "interactive" paper offers a grid pattern and thousands of small dots printed in invisible ink. The ink shows up when illuminated by infrared light, providing coordinate information to a small camera built into the pen. A control grid is also located to the side of the grid surface, with areas for different pen colors, arrows, boxes, erasers and other buttons.

Users can add arrows, circles, or boxes to highlight different areas of each slide during a presentation. The slides can be printed in light blue ink on the special paper, which works as a reference and a note pad. As the pen writes on the paper, the text is presented on the slide in real-time. Pressing the undo button reverses the previous action.

Canson's demo showed a variety of potential uses for the PaperShow system. Adding elements manually can provide a greater amount of flexibility. If questions are raised during a presentation, users can simply insert a blank slide and handwrite additional information. Any additions can be saved to the presentation software or exported as PDF files. Media content such as movies can also be initiated or stopped as needed.

The PaperShow package includes the pen, interactive paper, and the dongle which comes pre-loaded with the necessary software. Canson was at Macworld to tout the product for Macs, although the current software is limited to Windows machines. The Mac version is expected to be released sometime in the near future.

by MacNN Staff