http://www.mobilityguru.com/2005/12/19/ ... an_a_kids/
The article is long, but it goes into the technical details and it's worth checking out.
It was created in Sweden and has some cool uses.
The pen comes with special paper - with a unique proprietary grid on it. You can pull out one of these pieces of paper, draw a calculator on it, and then use it as an actual calculator by pressing the buttons with the tip of the pen.
You can also get little expansion application chips that plug into it - like the Spanish language chip.This is very important to understand. The Anoto pattern is not just one page in area. If the full pattern was printed out on paper, you would have 9.9508E+14 pieces of 8.5" x 11" (216mm x 297mm) paper. If spread out one page thick this paper would cover 23.2 million miles2 (60 million km2), about the size of Europe and Asia combined.
The Anoto pattern is so large that Anoto can assign different parts of the pattern to different pen-based computer manufacturers. So, for example, Leapfrog's Fly Paper does not work with Logitech's io2 Digital Writing System and vice versa.
More importantly, the Anoto pattern assures that the pattern on each piece of paper in a tablet or in a ream of paper is unique. The software associates specific user actions and programmatic responses with specific patterns. The specific piece of paper a pattern appears on is irrelevant. As an application is built or run, the patterns on each piece of paper become part of the program and its data.
On page 8 of the review there are also a couple videos showing the pen in use.
It's very cool technology, even if I'll probably never get one.
