"Smart Board" To Replace White Boards?

ZiZ writes "The BBC has released a story reporting a growing level of interest in Smart Board technology - particularly due to the efforts of Virtual-Ink's Mimio and variants thereof. Mimio gathers the information written on a whiteboard by virtue of "infared and ultrasonic receivers", stores it in a mobile base station, and allows for later downloading to a computer; it also has the ability to interface with a presentation, browser, or whatnot, in a mode they call mimioMouse, to allow cheap, interactive, real-time smartboards.This looks like it could be the high-tech breakthrough schools everywhere, not just in the UK, have been waiting for - or at least the beginning...and at a mere $400 or so, it's almost affordable enough to justify one in the home, too!"

Comments

Re:old tech...

[while(1)fork()0x42]

Actually, we've (SMART Technologies) been doing this for the last ten years, Mimeo put out their first product June 1999. We were the ones primarily responsible for putting interactive whiteboards into schools, and are the leader in virtually all markets for this technology, especially in the educational markets.

Our products are more expensive, but we've been working on these things for a long time. We feel that this experience has led to a quality product.

-Tim Cowley,
Software Developer,
SMART Technologies