[AG-TECH] electronic whiteboards

[John Shalf]

It would have been nice if 'wb' were part of the standard AG setup, but 
there are many reasons why it isn't so (perhaps it will be part of AG 
2.0?) :-)

We've been playing with the E-Beam from Electronics for Imaging Inc.
	http://www.e-beam.com/

* They are relatively inexpensive 'bout $500
* Its reasonably accurate although we are stretching it to its limits 
with our display surface.  I understand there is now a way to gang them 
together to cover more surface area though (Deb Aggarwal knows more 
about that feature).
* Their whiteboard software is free (you can download it from their 
website).  So people who don't have e-beam systems can use their mouse 
to collaborate with people who have the whiteboard.
* Even if you don't have their software or your platform isn't 
supported, you can connect to the e-beam server using your web-browser.  
It provides a rudimentary java program that allows you to participate in 
the whiteboard session that is embedded in your web browser as if you 
had the full-fledged software.  So I can hop on an SGI/IRIX box and do 
collaborative whiteboard figures with all of my friends on the AG
* They offer an SDK that allows you to directly access the e-beam pen 
coordinates and use them directly in your own applications.  Perhaps you 
can use it for overlays or to control collaborative graphics apps as 
well...

Anyways, I've been pretty impressed with it so far.  The fact that the 
software is free and that even people without the software can 
participate in the whiteboarding session makes it feasible to deploy.  
Heck, we consider the $4k Gentner standard equipment for the AG (its 
proprietary)... why not a $500 whiteboard system???

I'm not entirely certain how you can do overlays on slides though... I'd 
have to think some more about how you'd do that.  It would be an 
interested project to try out with their SDK.

-john


On Tuesday, October 22, 2002, at 08:31  AM, Cindy Sievers wrote:

> Has anyone used an electronic whiteboard on the Access Grid to share 
> notes?
> What are the issues associated with this?  What other alternatives are 
> there? We are going to do a class over the grid and the instructor 
> wants to be able to annotate and write notes on a whiteboard for remote 
> and local students to see. He would really prefer to write on his 
> slides (which are in LaTex and need to be converted to PowerPoint - 
> another issue - is this possible?).  Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> ============================================
> Cindy Sievers           Los Alamos National Laboratory
> sievers at lanl.gov        Group CCS-1 MS B287
> tel:505.665.6602        Advanced Computing
> fax:505.665.4939        Los Alamos, NM 87544
> ============================================
>