A Novel Input Device - I.R.I.S. IRISPen 
  

IRISPen is a small handheld scanner that is specialized in form and function on stream like text input. 

How it works 

The user just has to slide the pen over a text section while pressing a button and IRISPen reads it, recognizes the text and enters it at the present cursor position or cell. The pen can read text, bar codes and handwritten numbers. 

IRISPen is light and portable. You only have to plug it in and the start the background software. 
The optical character recognition (OCR) runs totally in the background and the data can be entered into every application. 
 

IRISPen could be applied wherever you use paper and online documents in parallel like in every office of for studies. Often you want to enter short text sections, like numbers, names, titles, quotes or web links from paper into an online document. Instead of looking them up, high-lighting them with a text marker and then typing them in you simply could scan them in immediately. 

I see a lot of practical applications for people who are writing excerpts, who want to have their own short versions of textbook chapters etc.  Another application could be that executives take numbers from written reports, journals, bills etc. and put them together in a spreadsheet for finding out about trends and for making strategic decisions. Especially copying numbers takes a lot of concentration that could be taken away by IRISPen. The user can concentrate on the facts instead of on the input. 

With a special software package, that is also available from I.R.I.S. it is possible to translate the scanned text into and from six languages and to   let the machine say the words. So you always have a dictionary function that even helps you with the pronunciation. 

Finally it could be used for identifying objects with bar codes in an office environment. This could be good for inventory bookkeeping, book administration and product recognition in incoming mail packets. 
 

Why it is a nice input device 

The IRISPen is a nice device because it has a wonderful metaphor. Just use it like a text highlighter. It has the same shape and application. With this metaphor it fits into every office environment, even into executives offices. So the context of interaction is right: The "bank managers do not type" argument does not apply. These people read, mark and let their secretaries type the stuff then. This takes time. Why not reading it in , so it can be edited immediately? 

As it just inserts the text at the present cursor position, the user does not have to learn another scanner program, and, most important, he does not have the burden to transfer the scanned information from the scanner to an OCR tool and then into his application - it's just done on the fly. 

IRISPen just looks if it does not put any extra cognitive load on you, but reduces the level of concentration that is necessary to work in parallel on a paper document and on an online application. There may be some exceptions (see below). 
 
 

Naturally I have not tested the device, but from what I can infer from the description and the picture there might be some problems: 

• The pen movement must have a high degree of precision. You want to take certain words out of a long text document without having to delete some letters or a comma at the beginning or end of the section afterwards. If precision will require a very concentrated user then it might be hard again.
  
  
• To move the pen precisely and easy the user might need to use her right hand (or left hand respectively). But this hand is also handling the mouse. So for inserting numbers in a spreadsheet where you frequently have to select a new cell this could be annoying.

For entering text segments into an empty document to later write a text with them it could be useful if there was a special mode that inserts a carriage return after each chunk. 
 

• Often you not only want to have the fragments entered into an online document but you also want to have the text marked. For this application, that I assume is very common, the pen should be able to do both: Scan in the section and mark it in a color. Probably this is difficult from the technological point of view.