Today Wacom announced a new product called the Inkling. It’s a real ballpoint pen with a sensors that track and store what you’re drawing. The concept is that you can draw for real and it is captured in a vector-based format that you can further edit on your computer.
It looks like an interesting concept, but there isn’t much detail beyond the quite lofty—but deliberately non-explicit—promise of ‘capturing a digital likeness’ of your drawing.
Looking at the technology I can confidently deduce a major drawback:
**It will capture lines only. No stroke width variation and no fill. **
The sensors can only detect two things: the location of the tip of the pen, and when the pen touches paper. The sensor starts tracking the line when the pen his the page, and stops when the pen is lifted. Each continuous stroke will be one line.
The drawing is being captured in real-time so the final product will be a collection of all this real-time data layered together.
What remains to be seen is the sophistication of the software. Will it automatically join lines that are obvious continuations of another? Will it turn 100% dense scribble into fill? Considering the fact that you can create a new layer at any time, I don’t think the answer to these questions will be ‘yes’.
As with any new technology, the first iteration has all the flaws. Look how long it took Wacom to get their tablets to the level of sophistication required for truly great digital illustration. The inkling will require just as much improvement and iteration as the tablet to become great, but I’m not so sure it will get the kind of serious attention that it needs.
