John W. Barrus

46.2: Real-Time Pen Tracking on Electronic Paper Displays

On most electronic paper displays (EPDs), low update rates lead to a poor user experience especially for pen-based markups. The slow update causes a remarkable delay between pen motion and visibility of the stroke. Even worse, this delay varies depending on the current part of the update cycle. This paper presents a real-time pen tracking method for EPDs, using a new display driver on an unmodified E Ink hardware platform. This method compares favorably to the iLiad E-Reader.

The CloudBoard Research Platform: an interactive whiteboard for corporate users

Over one million interactive whiteboards (IWBs) are sold annually worldwide, predominantly for classroom use with few sales for corporate use. Unmet needs for IWB corporate use were investigated and the CloudBoard Research Platform (CBRP) was developed to investigate and test technology for meeting these needs. The CBRP supports audio conferencing with shared remote drawing activity, casual capture of whiteboard activity for long-term storage and retrieval, use of standard formats such as PDF for easy import of documents via the web and email and easy export of documents. Company RFID badges and key fobs provide secure access to documents at the board and automatic logout occurs after a period of inactivity. Users manage their documents with a web browser. Analytics and remote device management is provided for administrators. The IWB hardware consists of off-the-shelf components (a Hitachi UST Projector, SMART Technologies, Inc. IWB hardware, Mac Mini, Polycom speakerphone, etc.) and a custom occupancy sensor. The three back-end servers provide the web interface, document storage, stroke and audio streaming. Ease of use, security, and robustness sufficient for internal adoption was achieved. Five of the 10 boards installed at various Ricoh sites have been in daily or weekly use for the past year and total system downtime was less than an hour in 2012. Since CBRP was installed, 65 registered users, 9 of whom use the system regularly, have created over 2600 documents.

An e-writer for documents plus strokes

This paper describes the hardware, software, and a document model for a prototype E-Writer. Paper like displays have proved useful in E-Readers like the Kindle in part because of low power usage and the ability to read indoors and out. We focus on emulating other properties of paper in the E-Writer: everyone knows how to use it, and users can write anywhere on the page. By focusing on a simple document model consisting primarily of images and strokes we enabled rapid application development that integrates easily with current paper-based document workflows. This paper includes preliminary reports on usage of the E-Writer and its software by a small test group.

A Real-Time Smart Display Detection System

A smart display detection system is proposed that allows users to connect with displays using mobile cameras. The smart displays dynamically update a server with information about the current screen content and the system matches captured images from mobile devices with the screen information. A synchronized timestamped matching strategy is employed to achieve high performance in detecting screens playing motion intensive video and an aggressive feature selection method is used to minimize bandwidth requirements.

Connecting content and annotations with livestroke

One common use for interactive whiteboards (IWBs) is to mark up content provided from a connected laptop. Typically a marking layer is provided which is independent of the laptop content. This leads to problems when the laptop content changes while the strokes in the mark up layer do not. The LiveStroke prototype described in this document uses computer vision techniques to associate the marks with the image of the underlying content from the laptop. For instance, if marks are made on the first page of a document, those marks disappear when the laptop user scrolls to a different page. The marks reappear in the right location on the page when the user returns to the first page. While we have integrated these techniques with interactive whiteboards the techniques are also applicable to screen sharing with mobile touch devices and projectors.