PARC Researchers Want To Make The Tablet PC Our Best Friend

Have you ever wished for your computer to really become your friend, understanding things your way and in the end of the day wrapping them up for you? We're talking about a buddy allowing you to edit handwritten notes, drawn figures or even just doodles.

In order to make the tablet PC that buddy researchers at PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, developed a research prototype image editor that allows you to extract, manipulate, and combine sketches, handwritten notes, whiteboard images, screen snapshots, and even scanned documents.

The prototype is called Scanscribe and it's available for online download here. I tried it at PARC and found it rather amusing; it's easy to get a grip on and pretty intuitive.

A computer friend like this obviously need eyes, so PARC researchers also developed ZombieBoard, a whiteboard scanner. It's a video camera taking snapshots of the whiteboard. "Stitched" together the snapshots form a mosaic image that can be printed, faxed, or displayed. Or processed in Scancribe.

Eric Saund, manager of the Perceptual Document Analysis Area at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory, PARC, addresses the problem wth too long booting times for tablet PCs to really become notepad replacements. But he says he believes Scanscribe and Zombieboard to be a nice starting platform for ubiquitous computing, though maybe not the killer application for tablet PCs.

"We believe in a game as the killer app, a game that benefits largely from a pen as an interface rather than a mouse," he says.

During a PARC brainstorm meeting several ideas came up on what such games would look like. Eric Saund came up with a fun little prototype that you can play here.