So, Shaper has a new product and it's a plastic computer vision marker frame to digitalize hand-drawn lines with a photo in a web app:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shaper/shaper-trace-go-from-sketch-to-vector-in-seconds

The marker pattern looks very much like Pi-Tag by Bergamasco et al. but I guess they don't rely need all the fancy tricks of that paper.

I generally very much like what they do (and they are one of the few succcessful companies that emerged from the field of human-computer interaction). But the pricing is a bit weird on this one.

The hard and labor-intensive part is the UX for the vector lines interface. Yet, they offer their service by charging 99$ for the plastic part.

I guess they could simply allow people to print a pattern on a regular piece of paper (just as they do with their computer vision assisted router) and charge a few cents for the web service. Do people really hate pay-what-you-use so much?