PressurePen stylus for iPad makes drawing on your tablet less bothersome

Drawing on your iPad, as many of us have sadly discovered, is not as easy as the TV commercials make it appear. Especially if you’ve worn out the screen a bit with usage and it needs to be calibrated every few days to keep it working smoothly. Most of have end up using rubber coated matchsticks or other homemade pointing devices to serve as styli for the must-have tablet though some of us do end up purchasing as-seen-on-TV products too that end up scratching our iPad screen beyond repair. For those us that aren’t blessed with the resources to keep buying these tablets every few months or replacing their screens with the help of tech wizardry, Charles Mangin, web developer extraordinaire and noted hardware "artiste," PressurePen is a cool new stylus made especially for the iPad that delivers you from all your stylus woes once and for all.

The unseemly looking PressurePen cones fitted with an audio-signal producing heart that lets your iPad’s screen discover how hard you’re pressing down on your stylus so your iPad can, via the audio jack of course, sense whether to draw a deeper or a lighter line. The PressurePen is designed to deliver over 1000 levels of pressure information to the iPad via the audio signal which makes it one of the finest drawing tools out there in the market today. For now, the PressurePen is available via the tinkerer’s Kickstarter projecting, pledging a fund to which will get you one of the first shipments of the product.

To get the PressurePen in a DIY kit form (where you can print your own 3D body shell and tinker with the open source software to customize the stylus to your own needs) you will need to pledge $30 towards the $10,000 fundraising goal before May 31st or pledge $60 to get a fully assembled, ready to run PressurePen whenever it is ready for production. Via: Technabob/ Kickstarter

MIT Media Lab creates new UI iPad app to make group work more intuitive

Back in the good old days, having a team collaborate on a group project translated into people huddling over a bunch of papers on the meeting desk where people would be free to provide inputs via doodles and gestures or silly drawings that served as rough drafts. In the computer era, all that translated to everyone sending out a lot of emails and PowerPoint presentation but people still pretty much huddled over hand drawn sketches to get the actual work done. We guess people working in graphics-intensive industries like animation, architecture and generally any company that deems drawing flowcharts as an essential part of their job were just waiting for someone to come up with an iPad app that would allow them to work together on group projects where virtual 3D doodles would replace the old pen and paper ones.

And while we’re hoping that these would also come paired with a holographic projector that could beam a 3D picture right on top of a table and anyone could touch and move it to provide their input, a team from MIT Media Lab thought it would be better if they came up with an app that let users interact on projects while working on their separate iPads. The experimental design is called T(ether) and was created by designers Ken Perlin, Hiroshi Ishii, Dávid Lakatosand and Matthew Blackshaw, who claim that the collaborative display interface would make spatial expression more intuitive than drawing exemplary doodles on a paper.

The app basically lets users use augmented reality and a special sensor-fitted glove to share virtual space and manipulate virtual 3D objects with their hand together. Users can zoom, pinch, expand and do a heck lot of other things to virtual designs with gestures alone and would also allow others to essentially manipulate objects in the shared space the same way making it a less time consuming affair to “work together.” The natural application is one step short of a team standing in front of an enormous touchscreen display wall and creating 3D virtual objects together but it’s a good start for creative people who just can’t seem to get any work done without bringing their iPads to work anymore! Via: Fastcodesign