New Technology Let’s You Edit Real World Paper Drawings Using Computer

You draw something on paper and it gets modified or erased through a computer – the concept that has been materialized by the engineers at the University of Tokyo, the Naemura Group. Calling the “paper computing technology”, this new system let’s users automatically erase, copy and print hand-drawn sketches on paper using a laser and UV light. What you’re essentially doing here is converting an ordinary paper into a display. Never before have we been able to control what’s on paper through a computer in real time. In a video compiled by DigInfo, you can see that a user will be able to create 3D-like text by leaving only the edges of hand-written characters or simply draw a figure by hand and it gets automatically.

The setup includes a pen that uses Frixion thermo-sensitive ink, which gets erased to a high level of accuracy, at intervals of 0.024 mm. The paper used here is coated with a photochromic material and there is DMD-driven UV projector with a 1024 x 768 pixels resolution that prints the image onto the paper. So, what we’re looking at could be a paper-based version of Google Docs in the future. We will dynamically edit a real-world paper while sitting in two different countries. Sounds great, doesn’t it?