Bentley's Magic Paper

June 11, 2007, LONDON (BE Conference Europe) - What if you could mark up a paper drawings and the CAD drawing would automatically show your markups? Sound like magic? Actually, Bentley is displaying this technology and is calling it "dynamic plots." So instead of having to supply everyone in the field with tablet PCs, you could just supply them this magic paper? Well, not quite... It does take a special pen and paper.

Mark up a paper drawing and the markups appear on the proper MicroStation CAD drawing with this special pen and paper. (click for larger picture)

I had Mark Smith, Director of Bentley's new Applied Research Labs, explain the magic to me.

The secret is a pattern of dots that is printed on the paper and a miniature camera on the pen that can see the dots. The dots are arranged in a special pattern. The pen can interpret the dots to determine not only the location and motion of the pen as it writes but also to identify the paper and hence, the CAD drawing that was printed on it. You see, when the design was printed on "dynamic plot," Bentley's ProjectWise stored the dynamic plot ID.

The pen is wireless and can be used away from a computer. But when the user gets back to a computer, the pen is docked and the information is transmitted to the appropriate CAD drawing. Alternatively, it can use a Bluetooth equipped phone. The pen uses regular ink but unlike a normal pen, it has a camera and memory. "No trouble holding a weeks worth of markups" says Mark. But don't misplace it -- it costs something less than 400 Euros (over $500) .

The technology is on loan from Anoto (www.anoto.com), a Swedish company. Bentley is seriously looking into licensing the technology for use in future versions of their software.

The dots on the paper are small but visible to the naked eye. They make the sheet of paper look a medium shade of gray but the plot and markups are still easily visible. Still, I wondered why the the dots could not be printed in infrared as the pen uses infrared technology. The dot pattern printed each time is not unique but is probably unique enough -- it would take a vast number of prints (the say enough to cover Europe and Asia combined) before the dot pattern was duplicated.