>> "With so many people and students around the world working from home, we really need some easy to deploy shared whiteboard solution. This is especially important for pre-college students who may not have access to high end hardware."
>Just add a new mode to videoconferencing, where both parties get a white screen and both can start drawing and the resulting image stays in sync on both clients? (I feel like this solution is so obvious, I'm about to fly out a window - what am I missing?)
Author here.
There have been a few proposals in this space for the past 25 years including hangouts extensions, using a virtual camera that just exports the screen (if people remember the old mbone tools wb and vic; I myself wrote an extension to replace the camera with a snapshot from a configurable region of the X screen), and my own shared whiteboard which gives parties a shared screen that they can edit modify replay ...
There are two main reasons (in my opinion) why this space has been neglected:
- almost nothing matches the convenience, speed and _resolution_ of writing and drawing with an actual pen.
Pads with sufficient resolution and decent lag are only appearing now, and they are fragile and expensive.
Graphic tablets are cheap but lack the visual feedback and looking at the output on the screen still has significant latency.
They are moderately usable, but takes time to get used to them, and you need a real 10+in screen to use them effectively.
Using a finger or a conductive pen on a phone screen is only good for small sketches, not for writing longer sentences or formulas.
- the main users of such products would be non commercial entities (pre-college schools, students) so there are no paying customers.
Even at college level lectures are increasingly based on slides prepared in advance. Businesses, of course, use slides or meet in person, and the whiteboard style of collaboration is generally done in person.
Social distancing now may actually create more use cases and perhaps returns (in terms of actual money or social appreciation) that stimulate software solutions to appear.
The Apollo13 problem still stands: even if we had good and cheap technology for writing, at this time it would be impossible to build and sell such products to customers, so we have to find solutions that use hardware already in possession of the users.
> "almost nothing matches the convenience, speed and _resolution_ of writing and drawing with an actual pen"
Absolutely agree, which is why I think attempting to reproduce that convenience on a digital system would be the wrong assumption to begin with. Pen and paper are special.
I think the issues you described in combination to the original solution I mentioned could be mitigated by dynamically increasing the image size. So instead of viewing the screen as your entire whiteboard, it grows as you add more drawings/notes to it. So for example, you have the phone and the white drawing board screen, you scribble f(x) = on the entire horizontal surface (thus circumventing the inherently low resolution issue of most touch-screens) and then the image width doubles and shifts your view to the newly created whitespace, and so on.
It's not a perfect solution, but I think it could and believe it would lead to the same desired results. It's a compromise between human convenience and adaptation to (pre-existing) physical machine restrictions.
On the topic of financing... maybe crowdfunding, then?
Author here.
There have been a few proposals in this space for the past 25 years including hangouts extensions, using a virtual camera that just exports the screen (if people remember the old mbone tools wb and vic; I myself wrote an extension to replace the camera with a snapshot from a configurable region of the X screen), and my own shared whiteboard which gives parties a shared screen that they can edit modify replay ...
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/wb/
There are two main reasons (in my opinion) why this space has been neglected:
- almost nothing matches the convenience, speed and _resolution_ of writing and drawing with an actual pen. Pads with sufficient resolution and decent lag are only appearing now, and they are fragile and expensive. Graphic tablets are cheap but lack the visual feedback and looking at the output on the screen still has significant latency. They are moderately usable, but takes time to get used to them, and you need a real 10+in screen to use them effectively. Using a finger or a conductive pen on a phone screen is only good for small sketches, not for writing longer sentences or formulas.
- the main users of such products would be non commercial entities (pre-college schools, students) so there are no paying customers. Even at college level lectures are increasingly based on slides prepared in advance. Businesses, of course, use slides or meet in person, and the whiteboard style of collaboration is generally done in person.
Social distancing now may actually create more use cases and perhaps returns (in terms of actual money or social appreciation) that stimulate software solutions to appear.
The Apollo13 problem still stands: even if we had good and cheap technology for writing, at this time it would be impossible to build and sell such products to customers, so we have to find solutions that use hardware already in possession of the users.