New In-Depth Series: Going Back & Moving Forward
over 1 year ago
– Mon, May 22, 2023 at 10:00:48 AM
Dear backers,
Starting this week, we’re introducing a series called Going Back & Moving Forward where we’ll show more on the work that has been done to get to our campaign and the development we’re accomplishing as our campaign continues to soar!
We’d love to receive your comments on what you’d like to see next, but without further ado - here’s the overview for this update:
- Last call for Super Early Bird
- Going Back: From Ergonomics to The Second Concept
- Moving Forward: Date Augmented Notes & Patent Filing
Early Bird - Ending Soon!
Today is the last day to get the super early bird discount. Starting tomorrow, backers will pay $30+ extra for their Nuwa Pen reward. Get it while you can!
Going Back (to 2021): From Ergonomics to The Second Concept
We started Nuwa Pen R&D in March 2021, and this part of the series lasted until December 2021.
For an instrument that’s been used by billions in the last thousand years, it was important to us that our pen of the future had to both be comfortable and feel precise. The shape, position of the grip, diameter, length, weight, balance, texture and material are all important to consider when developing a pen. Below are months of our own research consolidated in one graph.
Nuwa Pen customers are primarily note-taking users and not technical drawers so we focused on comfort over precision and came out in just over 11mm in the shaft diameter.
This resulted in quite a few models, with the ones below being some of our favorites to hold. We didn’t focus too much on the components yet - we just wanted to make sure we had built a pen ergonomically sound that users could write for hours at a time.
But now that we had the ergonomics and user experience in hand, it was time to consider how we work backwards to the technology. So one of the first things we did was look for small commercial cameras. By this time we estimated that we needed 2mm, but the smallest available at that time was 8mm. These cameras were housed on a camera-enabled earwax remover! So we bought a couple, and strapped them to a pen. It provided the first insights into understanding how far a camera would need to be away from a pen tip in order to get a good image of the letters.
What we noticed after making lots of recordings, is that the way the user held the pen altered the images we were getting in. If you held the pen a bit skewed, then the letters would look longer for example. To have our software get a better understanding of this, we knew we needed an inertial measurement unit to understand the movement and orientation of the pen. In came the second proof of concept, which housed a camera, IMU and pressure sensor to activate the groundbreaking recording device. This unique combination of sensors gave birth to the origin of our patent pending TRIDENT system. Isn’t it beautiful? This was in the summer of 2021.
We had to develop our first orientation algorithms, from scratch, to understand how the pen was moving in real time. This way our computer vision algorithms could always get a flat surface of the paper to analyze. The very first conceptual results are shown below, we could binarize images from a camera and correct for orientation of the images. This was the first steps of TRIDENT - our innovative camera system. We thought it was brilliant!
The next step was to get it in a portable device, but we were in the middle of a chip crisis, so more on how we took on that challenge in the next part of Going Back & Moving Forward.
This series will continue to offer you a peek into the creation of the world's first AI-powered Smart Pen. As the series progresses, delve deeper into the minds behind the invention, our unique internal software, PenUI, and the power of searchability. Discover the compelling reasons behind our choice of proprietary machine learning to the unveiling of Nuwa Pen's future integrations. We can't wait to share more!
Moving Forward: Date Augmented Notes & Patent Filing
Here’s a live demo recorded in the office of how we added a handwritten date straight to our own calendar. Next up is going from your phone number to your contacts. All software is in development, and we'll update you about the improvements along the way.
We’ve also successfully filed our patent for Nuwa Pen! This means we can officially smack this label on our product now too.
This has been, is and will be an incredibly exciting journey. Very curious what you think so far, please let us know in the comments below!
Warm regards,
Marc and the Nuwa Pen Team