Pencil pushers: Smart stylus makes design simple

07 : 01 : 2014 New York : Seattle : US

New York, Seattle – Design developers at FiftyThree have produced the Pencil stylus, a digitally enabled, wooden pencil that lends an intimate tactility to makers, creators and innovators working on iPad tablets.

Inspired by a carpenter’s pencil, the sensor-controlled wireless device is embedded with Bluetooth technology that interacts with a coordinating downloadable app, enabling users to draw, blend, colour and erase on an iPad screen by simply flipping the pencil or swiping across the page.

‘We’ve been using pen and paper for over a thousand years, and now we have entered this new digital age we need to evolve,’ Jonathan Harris, co-founder of FiftyThree, told The Guardian newspaper. ‘We have these beautiful iPads, but we’re still working with this dead stick. A lot of things from the analogue world are still lacking on the digital side, so we wanted to bring a nice solution of digital and analogue together, and build a really expressive tool.’

For more examples of how brands are creating personal experiences through haptic products and services, read our Emotional Technology microtrend.

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