Electronic Whiteboards (eBoards)
The products developed by Ideogramic have
user-interfaces that are specifically designed to support
gestures. Gestures are pen strokes that are drawn by the
user with a pen or mouse, and which are then intrepreted by the
program and replaced by diagram symbols. If, e.g., you sketch the
outline of a box in Ideogramic UML, the tool will immediately
interpret this as the gesture for a UML class and replace your stroke
with a UML class symbol (see below).
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Before recognition |
After recognition |
This recognition and transformation happens continuously as you
work and thus allows you to easily and intuitively create
diagrams. Check out this streaming video for a larger example:
 slow connection (20K-100K) | fast connection (100K+)
The gestures for creating the diagram symbols have been designed to
resemble what you would draw on ordinary whiteboards. In the example
above, the box gesture thus resembles the symbol for a UML class. This
makes the gestures direct and easy to learn, and provides the user
with a intelligent and fast interaction with the program.
Hardware requirements
Electronic whiteboards come in two variations:
Integrated back-projected electronic whiteboards
This type of electronic whiteboards usually consists of a large box
with a large, touch-sensitive display area on the front, a
video-projector, and some mirrors inside. All in all this gives you
large interactive board that is projected from the back of the display
area (and that thus does not result in shadows when working in front
of it). This type of board is very expensive and space-consuming, and
thus is the less commonly used of the two types.
One example of this type of board is the SMARTboard:
A back-projected eBoard (SMARTboard)
Modular front-projected electronic whiteboards
Modular electronic whiteboards consist of:
- A standard whiteboard (or another white surface suitable for
drawing)
- A standard XGA video projector connected to a standard desktop
or notebook PC. The PC runs our software, and the projector outputs
the drawings to the whiteboard
- Special hardware -- e.g. Tool-Tribe, eBeam, or Mimio -- that should be mounted on the
whiteboard (with magnets or suction cups). This hardware tracks the
whereabouts of the pens and sends this information to our software
on the PC
A standard XGA video projector
A standard whiteboard with a Tool Tribe (seen in the corners)
This setup has several advantages over the integrated solution: it
is much cheaper (see our eStore), it support
different whiteboard sizes, it can easily be moved from one location
to another, and existing projectors and whiteboards can easily be
used. Their main disadvantage is that when you stand between the
projector and the whiteboard, you will cast shadows on the image. We
have not found this to be a significant problem though -- especially
if the projector is hung from the ceiling.
Questions?
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have further questions.
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