New ‘PaperLike’ Kickstarter wants to make writing on iPad Pro feel like paper

Writing and drawing with Apple Pencil on iPad Pro is an impressive experience thanks to very low latency, but fingerprints and smudges can make the surface feel slippery. The lack of friction can be disorienting if you’re used to drawing on paper. Now, a new Kickstarter campaign is focused on solving that problem.

The product is called PaperLike and its goal is to make the iPad Pro display feel more like paper. At first glance, PaperLike just looks like an iPad Pro-sized matte screen protector that we’ve seen on iPhones for years. These are usually marketed as having less glare, although the adhesive tends to create a rainbow effect and glare isn’t a huge problem on the iPad Pro thanks to its antireflective coating.

PaperLike seems to have the display quality effect in mind, however:

The PaperLike has the ideal roughness to noise ratio, and was the most important aspect we considered when creating the PaperLike. What use is it to have the paper feel, if the image quality is drastically reduced? That said, you can expect some image-noise, which didn’t cause any issues in our many tests by graphic artists and photographers.

As for Apple Pencil compatibility, the Kickstarter campaign video here shows the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil working just as intended … with the paper-like PaperLike screen protector in position.

The campaign launched earlier this month with a modest goal of raising $1600 with over $8000 raised so far from 400 backers. There’s still over a month left in the campaign and multiple pledge levels available if you want to join in before it wraps up. We’ll be curious to try PaperLike out ourselves and report back.