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"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!"
That's just great - we finally replaced our greenboard with a blackboard yesterday and here comes electronic whiteboards! Those redboards and blueboards must have snuck right by us. Talk about a paradigm shift...
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My university recently purchased a few of these to incorporate into a new Technical Communications course. The smart board was by far smarter than the teacher, but that's beside the point.
The boards were intuitive, responsive, and just plain fun to use. Paired with projectors built into the ceiling and interfaced with the terminal by the smartboards, we had quite the multimedia setup for our course. Special markers also added to the fun by allowing the prof to use different colors to 'overwrite' images on the computer that were projected onto the smartboard. Very very cool, and it never crashed or locked once, which I think is fantastic for such an input-sensitive windows system.
I hope to see more schools and universitites employ this technology, as it has a far greater and instant impact in the classroom than grants for new computers a school doesn't have the money to purchase licenses for.
As mentioned one of those "variants" is ebeam. It supports infrared, netmeeting, no-PC, Mac. Its smaller and works with larger boards.
http://ebeam.efi.com/
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This page is in Japanese, but you get the idea.. we had one of these at an old company. Basically it's a big whiteboard with the writing surfaces on rollers that can pass by a scanning element, which prints it out. It was called a "boardfax" or somesuch. Granted, this one sounds neater :)
I beleive this kind of technology is good mostly for teleconference. When one make a presentation and draw on top of it, it's nice to have this sent to the other site.
Better, if it can record not only the result, but the actual act of drawing, the presentation can be played back just like the speaker presented the stuff.
If the only use you have is to digitalise a board, 1.3M Pixel digital camera (turn off the flash) will give you more than you ask for... No need for special casing for your pencils and eraser, very portable, can be used on any "legacy" board, can be used after you started drawing (unlike most cheap digital board were you need to start drawing with the special pencils casing, you cannot digitalize something that was started with legacy tools).
stores it in a mobile base station, and allows for later downloading to a computer;
Wait, add a wireless network, make the plastic frame an antenna, and you don't even need the "mobile base station"!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Our group has been using a Mimio device for the last few months. We've used it when discussing issues. We don't have to take notes documenting our meeting discussion. They are saved automatically and available in color to distribute. Usually we just archive them.
The Mimio capture device used to fall down after a couple of days until we attached the semi-permanent mounting clips to the whiteboard.
We've been very pleased with our Mimio and it would suck to not have it after being used to it.
I haven't played with the MimioMouse functionality. That seems better for more organized presentations and training.
Not counting that Mimeomouse, the regular Mimeo product was pretty bad, at least a couple of years ago...you put the marker in a special holder, all well and good, but the mark only registers if you're pressing really firmly...it was way too easy to miss many lines, so we never could count on it as a reliable tool.
What I really want to see are big honkin' LCD flatpanel touchpanel white boards. (and the same technology for laptops while we're at it.) If it would make it cheaper, I don't the resolution would have to be all that great, just have great big pixels at 1280x960 or whatever.
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The downsides to it are that, left unchecked, the suction cups will pull off the wall and the whole business crashes to the floor. We've had to post a note for people to remove it from the board when they are finished so it won't get broken on the floor when it falls.
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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
We've used smartboards in some systems at work. Basically it's just a digital whiteboard. The image is shown using a projector. Whenever one of the pens is picked up, the software on the computer detects it and freezes the image. You can then draw on the board, and lines are shown. It's of course possible to save the image. The problem is that you have to stand in front of the board, blocking the image. It comes with 4 "pens" (with different colors) and an eraser. The board is just touch sensitive. By detecting which pen (or eraser) the user picks up it uses the correct color (there is one place for each pen, if you put the green pen in the blue tray and vice versa a blue color will be used even if you pick up the green pen.
The software we used was for windows, but the web page says that some of the features are available for Mac and UNIX/Linux too.
Probably everybody knows about this one, but we use a digital camera to capture important whiteboarding sessions. Maybe not as much fun as one of these nifty Mimio's, but it works fine for us.
-Thomas
The bad part about these smartboards, I believe, can be completely solved with next version smartboards.
Even in the most text-heavy discussions, it takes only about 2-4 minutes per page to type up what was written, and the graphics are clear because they're not moved anywhere.
Sure, it's not netmeetingable, and you can't get a nice little graphics file out of it, but how often do you really need that anyway?
Besides, usually what comes out of those meetings are either very rough screen prototypes, or to-do items that have to get put into a project plan and retyped anyway.
The other beautiful thing about paper is the built-in revision control. Crossing out items and using multi-color pens makes it simple.
I've used SmartTech's SmartBoard regularly over the past few years. Here's my impressions:
There is a bit of a learning curve; it's not a huge one, but enough that unless someone makes a small bit of an effort, they never will use the technology.
*However*, once you put the time in to know how to effectively use it, it is an amazing technology.
Being able to flip to a new page with a tape on the board, and flip back and forth between pages is huge. Also, in cases where you need *just* a little more room but don't have it, you can select the whole area, and reduce it in size a bit, and draw the stuff you wanted to add. Extremely handy. It's cases like these that it *saves* you a lot of time.
Being able to have a full web/printable transcript of a session is also a huge timesaver.
SmartTech's software also has features for timing agenda's, assigning task responsibilities, and other very neat conferencing features. (Also supports remote whiteboarding, good for those videoconferences).
I've always wanted to try Mimeo's unit to compare, but never had the time. Hardly new technology, but definitely very useful.
The biggest problem is that in order to make best use of these types of units, you also need an LCD projector, which makes the cost of the SmartBoard/Mimeo unit look pretty small.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
A function to create the sound of chalk scraping, to wake sleeping undergrads?
:)
I'd not want to give that up if I was a lecturer.
Smart Boards not all they are cracked up to be. They are inaccurate, very crude, and uncomfortable to work with. Aside from blocking the projector all the time... It's just another silly case of "we must make this digital so that it's 'cool'" phenomenon.
But aside from that, they are just plain and simple a Bad Idea. The whole point of a chalk board or a white board, or even a scratch pad, is that you have freedom in your sketches. You are expressing ideas or at least trying to develop those ideas. The moment that you have to try to conform your ideas into some sort of restriction from the paradigm of your media, you lose pieces of your idea. Example: lines on paper, text only for jotting ideas on your Palm Pilot, etc.
Enter the Smart Board. Regardless of the resolution, you're still dealing with pixels (probably pretty low res for the size of the surface versus the resolution of the projector). You're conforming what you want to express to a grid. Now while that may not seem like such a big idea, how often have you found that you write in tiny little details or hash marks or some other marking on a diagram? Sometimes those are very useful. What if you tried to draw a couple parallel hash marks and found that the resolution of the white board was insufficient to draw them... and made one thick line.
It's little nuances like this that make Smart Boards utterly useless. You have to be as freeform as possible when expressing ideas! You should set the guide lines... and not your canvas.
Why bother.
So you're saying if you specify price in hexidecimal British pounds, they'll give it to you for free? Sweeeet . . .
We have a classroom environment in which we have 6 of these SmartBoards. They're so so, we really haven't put them to a lot of use. They work great, when properly configured. But, even when configured, the boundary lines usually go astray after awhile.
... except it's hard, for an instructor, to have the steps in his mind of: pick up the black pen, write, put the pen back into the black slot, pick up the blue pen, write ... etc. You have the urge write in black, then write in blue, then back in black, without putting the pens back in their respective slots, and that makes everything funny :)
For example, we have the smart board in the center of the class, flanking it are two very large projector screens on the wall. They're two different sizes, so the image on the smart board is magnified to fit the projection. Well, the problem is that when you start drawing a box on the Smartboard, it'll fit on the smart board, but will start going outside the scope of the projection. A 2"x2" box appears 12"x12" on the smart board sometimes, sometimes it's smaller, it goes all over the place.
A straight line isn't always a straight line. A straight line drawn on the Smartboard will end up looking like a line at a 15* slope on the projection, so the whole image/text is askew.
And the eraser? Well, it works so-so. it doesn't always erase what's on the 'clipboard'. You can erase all the ink, but you constantly have to step back to look at the projection to see if there's still stuff in memory that wasn't erased, then feel around the board to try and erase it all.
Other than that, it works great
Just my experience...
Instead of buying clips, try sticking the suction cups to the board with clear silicone RTV sealant. It will still peel off, but only when you want it to (it takes considerable effort).
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Smart Boards not all they are cracked up to be. They are inaccurate, very crude, and uncomfortable to work with. Aside from blocking the projector all the time...
Haven't used one recently, have you?
First, you don't have to block the board. The ones we use are rear projection so they just look like a big TV set. You can also get overlays for plasma TV screens- neither have this problem.
Now while that may not seem like such a big idea, how often have you found that you write in tiny little details or hash marks or some other marking on a diagram? Sometimes those are very useful.
If you're writing so small that a 1024x768 screen can't pick it up, nobody in your audience can either. These aren't designed to be used alone: they're for people to use in classrooms/teleconferences. Put a single black pixel up and step back 10 feet- you won't see it. You need an area of at least 6-10 pixels.
Eric
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But aside from that, they are just plain and simple a Bad Idea. [...] Regardless of the resolution, you're still dealing with pixels...
I must take issue with you there... I think the idea is sound; poor resolution merely points to a bad implementation, or insufficient technology to properly realize the Good Idea.
I don't know what other objections you have, but it seems to me that the possible advantages make it a no-brainer with regards to whether the basic concept is sound. Digitizing the whiteboard can give you so many abilities:
I think the list can go on and on.
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For anybody that uses a digital camera to take snaps of your whiteboards I heartily reccomend a piece of software called (imaginatively enough) "Whiteboard Photo". This specialized piece of software massages your snaps such that the print you get is perspective corrected and the background is cleaned up. When you download your snaps from the camera you can either batch process the photos or you can handle them individually. If you handle them individually you can define the area of the board a bit better - the software usually does a good job of recognizing the corners of the whiteboard but sometimes you need to reposition the corners (which is a simple click-drag). Overall it does a pretty impressive job and is easily worth the money and now no unlucky person has to be picked to frantically try to trascribe the boards manually.
One of our conference rooms always seems to end up with the old dried up markers - the ones that are hard to read even when you're sitting right in front of the board - the software even does a pretty good job converting those into usable prints.
We also use it to take snaps of flip charts with equally good results.
Here's a site that has a review.It costs $100 US direct from the Pixid web site and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. We bought our copy thru an online vendor (whose name escapes me at the moment) for $79 US but a search should turn up other vendors.
P.S. - one word above was intentionally misspelled to give the anal-retentives among us something to whine about.
Modal behavior is a bad idea when it comes to user interface design. See Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (pun intended). There are many ways the write/erase system could have been made non-modal. I don't think you should laugh at people who can't figure out bad designs.
These gadgets are initially attractive, but basically suck. Everywhere I've seen them installed, they go unused. First there are the inherent problems: the pen holders are large and awkward, the markers always seem to dry out due to poor engineering of the pen cap, the tiny expensive batteries wear out (and whose job is it to replenish them?), the pen holders are usually made of dark plastic that camouflages the fact that they are covered in ink - people learn not to touch them. The special eraser is undersized and rapidly becomes choked with ink.
Then there are the self-made problems. I worked for a VBC that wanted to install these gadgets in our conference rooms. However we didn't like the PC-centric approach which makes it a hassle to set up for each meeting with someone's personal laptop. We wanted to simply put the equipment on the network. Since the gear is not network-friendly, we were going to put a small Linux box in each room to publish the images on our intranet. We found that none of the vendors would disclose the protocol used between the host and the hardware. We tried reverse engineering it and found it very difficult.
I now work for one of the companies that makes these things. Although we have them in our conference rooms, nobody uses them for obvious reasons. I wrote an email to the product manager explaining why $VBC had not bought the product, and that enterprise customers need open, standards-based products that they can integrate into larger systems. I got no response.
So, aside from the inherent defects of these gadgets, they are one more bright idea that will never come to fruition under the current PC-centric, proprietary mindset. I really think that the current Microsoft-inspired climate is throttling the development of the computer industry.