[AG-TECH] Electronic Whiteboards

[Markus Buchhorn]

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