patent conflicts
A reader called Sybille stated in the randform post about jBoard – Tims software for electronic boards: “What I do not like about those tablets is that you need to use these uncomfortable pencils.”
Here my brief reply to Sybille:
you do not always need pencils, it depends on the tablet. In this randform video a neighbour uses gift wrap as an input device. You can see that with the thick side of the wrap she draws on the ipod, the small side seems to produce not enough capacitance for drawing. Using two loops of the wrap the gesture translation system translates this into the ipod zoom. So depending on your gesture translation you could even maybe play a little cricket game.
However in some sense your body acts as a conducting material, hence you have to be careful, since if you should accidentally hold an open wire of an electronic device, like a speaker cable in your other hand then you may be in conflict with a Microsoft patent – if I rightly understand the abstract at
http://architectradure.blogspot.com/2007/05/method-and-apparatus-for-transmitting.html.