It’s the digital age and social media is our new friend. Sites like Facebook already let our friends know what online newspaper or article we are reading, so it’s only natural for technology to want to bridge the gap between the surreal and paper. The next time you have a book in hand and want to immediately tweet a quote; you’ll probably have something like the Kuote to help you out.
This nifty device is adept at copy-pasting text from paper to the digital world, thanks to its Internet connectivity and intuitive micro lens beneath the glass surface.
Here is how it works, “to use Kuote, place this piece of glass on anything that has text on it. The micro lens inside will reflect the image beneath to the embedded camera. The optical character recognition (OCR) technology can detect the edge of each character and translate it into a digital text format. Circumnavigate the edge of the hole with your finger to move the cursor, and then select the text with a finger drag. The text will be highlighted as if you were using a marker. Swipe upwards with two fingers to use this selected text for a Tweet or a Facebook message, or save a note in your could storage service. More gestures can be pre-set to activate a specific service. Swing the Kuote to reset it.”
Kuote won the 2011 red dot design concept award.
Designers: Xu Tao, Wang Junfeng, Christina Yang & Gong Yanyan for Orange Labs Beijing
