"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

Not so hot in our class

[jaydho]

We have one of the Mimio's in our class and I'm not too impressed by it.

It's fine for just advancing a slide in a presentation, but for clicking it's kinda cumbersome. Best analogy I can think of is the touchpads on laptop, the tap and wait or double tap is too slwo for my tastes.

What does work well for us is a nice LCD display for the presenter to use in conjuction with the projected image and a wireless mouse.

Finally, we had to get new marker boards which were very expensive (the regular dry erase boards glare pretty badly.) The new one's do the trick with little glare but they were at least a couple grand.

Here's hoping soon I won't have to leave my dorm and go to those darn classrooms, today is the start of spring break for us anyway though :-)

Re:Our experience with SmartBoards

[Trinity-Infinity]

Those are exactly the ones we used. I didn't include the name in my original post since I couldn't remember who manufactured the boards.

We had two of the larger screens, paired side-by-side, and one project capable of projecting an image onto each screen concurrently. We had a windows box that ran the smartboard software, and we'd load our presentations on there, and use the board and markers to write on our slides as we discussed them with the class.

Another monitor hooked up to the same windows box controlled the projection unit. We'd choose sources of either the windows box, a document projector/scanner, our laptops could be hooked up and selected as well, and there was also a VCR option to project video to the smartboard, but we never got to try that feature.

In all, the smartboards were more memorable than the class, but I would have done *much* better in high school had some courses used these boards to illustrate points (Biology, history, math, you name it!)

Re:SmartBoard

[PhotoGuy]

Oh yeah, one other difference between the SmartBoard and the Mimio (sorry for the mis-spelling above), is that the SmartBoard can be used with regular styli, rather than specialized ones.

The way the SmartBoard works is that it has four trays at the bottom, one for red, green, and blue markers, and one for an eraser. There's a led/photocell on each, which lets the board determine when you've picked up a given marker, and thus will draw in the appropriate color (or erase). If you wanted to actually physically write on the board, you could use a regular red/green/blue dry erase marker (personally, I never wrote on it, just let the LCD project digital ink, to keep the surface from looking cruddy after awhile).

When all markers were in their places, then touching the unit gave mouse-like behaviour, so you could use windows applications just by touching the screen with your finger. Very cool. Similarly, if you didn't want to use the stylus, you could just pick it up (so the unit saw the marker missing), then draw with your finger, which seems weird at first, but I prefer it at times.

Oh yeah, another big feature of interest to /. folks, is that SmartTech has Linux support. At first glance, Mimio doesn't appear to.

-me