[AG-TECH] Electronic Whiteboards

[Steven]

There are a couple of small whiteboards from Hitachi, useful for the large
lecture theatre. Allowing the lecturer to annotate hi presentation and
display it on the large screen. I haven't seen one up close, but it looks
interesting.

http://www.hitachi-soft.com/starboard_1.1.5.htm

Steven Jack

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf
Of Markus Buchhorn
Sent: 31 March 2004 07:42
To: Gurcharan S. Khanna; Robert Callaway; AG_TECH
Subject: Re: [AG-TECH] Electronic Whiteboards

At 00:40 31/03/2004 -0500, Gurcharan S. Khanna wrote:
>i'm wondering how would this integration look? would the mimios (i presume
you mean the large wall mounted ones) 

The ones that you stick onto normal whiteboard surfaces (or similar), yes.
The e-beams are about the size of your hand in an L-shape, the mimios more
like a fat ruler. For those that haven't tried them, bear in mind, these are
real-time pen-tracking whiteboards, not "printing-whiteboards" that output
an image when you are finished.

>be an input device to be rendered on the computer screen via wdb or the
equivalent? 

Fundamentally yes, but there are various issues. These are good points. It
will vary a lot by application. 

The default scenario is a whiteboard in a theatre that may or may not be
visible to the local audience. But the digital output of the whiteboard goes
up (in real-time) on the local display, and any remote displays in the same
AG venue (say) - so every site gets the same view. In the case of most local
audiences, this is better than they get with a pure hardware whiteboard -
more than 5 rows back it gets small to see, so a large projected version
will help. 

In one theatre here we have no room at the front for a whiteboard, so it's
now going on the side wall - hard to see for around half the audience, so up
on screen will fix that. Turns out we'd solved a problem before we knew we
had it :-). Downside is that you need to have a projector on when using the
whiteboard locally to a room-full of people.

>if so, only the local audience gets
>the advantage of the full size whiteboard. 

The projected whiteboard in most theatres would be bigger than a normal
whiteboard, higher-contrast, and potentially better positioned for the whole
audience to see. Regardless of being in the same room as the whiteboard or
not (that's a protocol/transport issue ;-) dealing with packet-loss,
latency, etc.). So I think the benefit is (potentially) even for all
participants (it depends on your node-op).

>i suppose smaller graphics tablets
>could be used instead as individual input devices; and these are just
perhaps
>more convient than drawing with the mouse directly into wb. 

Exactly right - mice are not great for sharing round a table, or for drawing
quick diagrams, especially with the click-to-draw mode for 2D mice that pens
do automatically (being 3D aware :-) ).

I'd love to integrate the electronic whiteboards with tablet-PCs and other
software whiteboards, so they are all I/O devices to the same "space" or
content. 

>while all these
>scenarios would work, i guess i'm thinking about the different experience
had
>by the local audience v. the virtual audience.

And it gets worse :-) The astronomers want to be able to share their
whiteboard, and see other people's whiteboards. Fine. Then they wanted them
to be co-planar so they could write on each others whiteboards... I can
imagine some tricks with projectors and drawable surfaces, but I can't use
that in many theatres (rear-projection is needed, to avoid shadowing). You
can put the tracker onto a monitor or LCD if you want though.

I can also see issues where you have groups huddled around a whiteboard at
multiple sites, i.e. where more than one person at a site is writing on a
whiteboard, and they all also want to see the other sites' whiteboards. This
is something that SmartBoards I think can do very well - the local writing
surface and the remote display are in the same plane. But they cost 5 times
as much and don't scale up to the size or resolution that these whiteboards
do.

Interestingly, the electronic whiteboards can also have digital "buttons" on
them that cause "something to happen", e.g. print-display, wipe-display,
save-display, etc. with no ink going onto the whiteboard/display. That leads
into thinking about a "whiteboard" (or similar surface) with "pens" as a
user-interface for other tools, e.g. the AG venue client, or your display
manager, or your word-processor, or something else. Poor man's tablet-PC
(6ft by 4ft :-) ), or a sort-of new way of interacting with large displays?
Variation on the idea of free-air mice.

But fundamentally, our users initially just want to scribble on a surface to
explain a point during a talk, and have the other site see it clearly,
better than a camera pointed at (and failing to focus on) a normal
whiteboard, or a document camera watching your hand. That's our first
priority. Anything after that.... <shrug>. There's a lot of potential.

If people have comments, ideas, etc please let me know. 

Cheers,
        Markus


Markus Buchhorn, ANU Internet Futures Group,       |Ph: +61 2 61258810
Markus.Buchhorn at anu.edu.au, mail: Bldg #108 CS&IT  |Fx: +61 2 61259805
Australian National University, Canberra 0200 Aust.|Mob: 0417 281429