Daniel G. Van Olst

Whiteboard sharing: capture, process, and print or email

Whiteboards support face to face meetings by facilitating the sharing of ideas, focusing attention, and summarizing. However, at the end of the meeting participants desire some record of the information from the whiteboard. While there are whiteboards with built-in printers, they are expensive and relatively uncommon. We consider the capture of the information on a whiteboard with a mobile phone, improving the image quality with a cloud service, and sharing the results. This paper describes the algorithm for improving whiteboard image quality, the user experience for both a web widget and a smartphone application, and the necessary adaptations for providing this as a web service. The web widget, and mobile apps for both iPhone and Android are currently freely available, and have been used by more than 50,000 people.

Mobile web browsing initiated by visual search

Mobile applications are increasingly becoming part of our lives and our work. Moreover, visual capture capability on mobile devices is increasingly being used for linking the real world and the digital world. In this demonstration paper we present an application for accessing and browsing web sites by pointing a mobile phone at a text book or a printout of a web site, taking a picture of a small region, performing content recognition and automatically displaying a web site that is linked to the content.