Inventing the future of onscreen writing
Computer engineering student Grzegorz Gut is showing off the fruits of his labour. Resting his hand on the screen of a computer tablet, he moves a stylus across it, precisely marking up an electronic document just as he would a piece of paper.
Over the past year-and-a-half, working with Assistant Professor Samar Abdi, Gut developed the device, called Scribble, that can discern between the pressure of his hand and the stylus on a resistive screen.
The project recently won first prize in the undergraduate category at the first ever Regroupement Stratégique en Microsystèmes du Québec (ResMIQ) Innovation Day.
“The idea was to try to find some kind of algorithm to detect what corresponds to a stylus and what corresponds to a hand,” Gut explains. “We tried different things and we came out with a couple of pretty good ideas, coded them, and this is what we have.”
Although Gut admits there is still some work to be done to perfect the software, the working prototype was impressive enough to win over the judges at Innovation Day and earn the Scribble team the top prize of $1,000.
“There were some really good ideas … but I think what they were looking for was something completely new,” Gut says. “I think that’s why we won, because it’s something that’s really new.”
Gut says he has always been interested in technology, but that he had a hard time bothering with his school work. He dropped out of Cegep and found work doing tech support for information technology companies.
After working for a few years, Gut had to be persuaded to apply to university. After being accepted into Concordia’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it didn’t take long for the reluctant student to find his feet, and then some.
Gut’s impressive academics earned him an Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and he began working with Abdi on developing tablet-writing software.
“He came to visit me and he was looking for a project,” Abdi recalls. “I had this idea in the back of my mind, and I had some funding. Greg has a very strong record, just As and A-pluses. He’s a smart guy. That’s why I wanted to hire him.”
The partnership worked perfectly for Gut, who would go away and work on a specific problem, and consult with Abdi when he hit a roadblock. “I would go and see him, and say ‘I’m doing this and I’m really stuck’ and he would take a look back and say, ‘Why don’t you try this approach, or that approach?’ ”
The experience of developing Scribble with Abdi came to define Gut’s time at Concordia. “I’ve spent a year-and-a-half on it, and I’ve enjoyed every single moment of it,” he says, with a huge smile. “The whole idea is there, and we kind of proved that it’s possible. This is what we wanted to do. We proved that we can do it.”
Abdi says there is the potential over the long term to develop a tablet that is uniquely capable of differentiating between the user’s palm and the stylus. In the meantime, Gut will continue working on enhancing the Scribble device with his Capstone project teammates. “We want to turn it into a collaborative device,” he says. “If there are two people who have the device … they can work on the same document at the same time.”
Related Links:
• Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Regroupement Stratégique en Microsystèmes du Québec (ResMIQ)