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Hi HN,

During the pandemic, two friends and I built Grapic [1], an AR app to let us use real paper and whiteboards to brainstorm when working remote. We're all visual thinkers and found the drawing part really lacking in tools like Miro.

The aim is to make it possible to screen share any real surface. We use AR and some computer vision to let you mark a rectangle on a flat surface (like a whiteboard or paper notebook), and then stream a stabilized and "flattened" version of that surface as video. The video can either be shared as to a webRTC room that you can access with a link or directly into a zoom meeting over Airplay [2].

The app is currently iOS only and we're holding off an Android version until we know there is sufficient demand.

We would be super thankful for any feedback or advice!

Best

Niko

[1] Grapic website: https://www.grapic.co/

[2] Note: There is unfortunately a bug in Zoom on macOS Monterey where Airplay to Mac interferes with Zooms Airplay screen sharing. Zoom is working on a fix but in the meantime there is a workaround: https://www.grapic.co/zoom-troubleshooting

I was telling my young cousins in their teens that back in the day every office and classroom had a massive projector that looked like a retro interpretation of a goose. At the beginning of a lecture the professor would wheel this massive hunk of metal to the front of the room and shut off the room lights. The metal hunk was transparent on top and shot a powerful beam of light up vertically and the goosehead would reflect the light onto the wall. The professor on transparent sheets of plastic and colorful pencils would give their lecture with writing and illustrations on the wall. This was before PowerPoint was a thing.

I can't tell you how exciting technology is sometimes that I literally can feel excitement about something like this whiteboard system while also feeling nostalgia for the past. Love this tool thank you Niko.

I remember those projectors fondly too. I guess it was a hassle to keep all the pages in order during a presentation and so on but they were also so flexible. Super easy to just draw on top of a picture.

So happy you like the tool and find it exciting! So do we =)

Hey Niko,

So nice to see you sharing this. I think it's a very useful tool. I love your landing page, and the app is incredibly fast and intuitive.

When I was still working at Spotify, there were many cases where we needed to show a whiteboard in a meeting. It was always awkward, borderline impossible to show stuff in a mixed in-person/remote meeting. This is where I think your product will fit in. If it's remote-only, people can use an iPad; for in-person, the whiteboard will do the job. But these mixed scenarios - even just a meeting between two teams, one in London, one in NY for example - they were just unbelievably awkward.

The company looked into solutions like digital whiteboards, and while I'm sure they are great in theory, it also means you always need to get a room that has one of these. Anyone who's worked at a big corp knows how hard it can be to find a meeting room. We had some prototypes standing around (in open areas, actually - for whatever reason), but they were rarely used. These things are brutally expensive, too - your product is just an infinitely better idea IMO.

For my personal use (fully remote team), I found it tricky to hold the camera while also drawing. Using a tripod surely works, but then I can also just use the iPad and draw stuff there.

I would highly encourage you to promote this as a tool for larger corporations with multiple offices. The Zoom integration is fantastic in this regard - I don't know how hard it would be to also integrate with Google Meet (that was the software we used), but I think that that's the way to go.

Again, fantastic work. Very impressive implementation, and I think it's a great idea!

Disclosure to HN: Niko and I know each other personally, and I already used Grapic when it was in beta.

Thanks, I really appreciate the kind words!

For us I guess the need arose in a pure remote environment. But none of us had ipads to draw on at that time. Totally agree on the mixed / hybrid work setup though. I think I've had a million awkward meetings around a whiteboard with one or two remote team members trying to see what was going on with a laptop camera pointed to the whiteboard.

We realized quite quickly that we need good integrations for this tool to be really useful and we'd really love to have integrations with Teams and Meet as well. Those services are much tougher to get video into though but hopefully we can have something there relatively soon. Another cool use-case we think is together with digital whiteboards like Miro or FigJam. We have a pretty cool FigJam integration coming up which we're hoping will be a really nice experience.

Hi Niko, this rocks! How would you suggest adding a feed to an app other than Zoom, or into a website? Just an iframe or something like that? I'd be interested in an api that allowed me to integrate this into a web app.

Thanks malloryerik! Yeah, easiest is really just an iframe. When you create a new web room, the url will be https://app.grapic.co/room/<room id>. If you instead use https://app.grapic.co/embed/<room id> it will render a slightly more minimal version that looks better as an embed.

Hi, Niklas from Grapic here.

Thanks for the kind words. We absolutely think integrations with more tools will be super cool, both meeting tools and others. We are building a FigJam integration at the moment that will be based on an embedded iFrame. I would be happy to chat more with you about your use case, please reach out to our email or chat on our website!

Hey, Niko,

Nicely done! Very smooth stabilization. I'm curious: in most of the examples on your site you show the smartphone quite close to the shared surface. What's the maximum distance you've tested? Can I use it to share someone else's surface?

Our team is working on a very similar challenge: sharing any offline surface through real-time digitization. Check it out when you get the chance: https://sharetheboard.com

Love seeing more and more focus on real surfaces! Anything that brings us back to real whiteboards is welcome in my book. Keep up the great work!

Hey marcind,

Thanks alot! And same to you! sharetheboard looks cool =). The physical world has so many benefits, it's really such a waste not to use it.

We haven't really done any specific testing to figure out the max distance away from a surface to share. But it definitely works in room scale settings.

It is pretty interesting to see how the pandemic is pushing people to come up with various product ideas. For whiteboards, there have been many ideas and concepts lately. I am also working on a whiteboard app but it is a different concept. Our tool is using AI to recognize the shapes that make it easy to draw otherwise you end up drawing messy shapes on screens. Here is link to our landing page: https://lekh.app

I like your tool rajeevk. Will definitely have a try!

I was JUST telling a peer today that something like this 'just makes sense', and here it seems the inevitable has happened in very short order. I can't wait to show this to them! Thanks Niko and team

Thanks! Let us know how it works for you!

I’d switch the order of the testimonials so it says: company name, title. Right now it reads like a bunch of testimonials from your own company when looking around.

Good advice. Thanks!

Fixed, thanks for the feedback!

I think there's a small typo right at the bottom of the page where it says 'hazzle' but should say 'hassle'.

Cool app!

Thanks! Will fix!

Nice catch, fixed now! Thanks!

While this seems cool how is the action of holding the phone with the other hand for an extended period? Or maybe just use a tripod.

For longer sessions I tend to use a tripod, or a coffee cup, for sure. One thing we've noticed when using it ourselves is that as the stabilization and other details got better holding the phone started to take less and less mental energy. Also, in practice I'm actually only drawing for quite short spurts when talking, so I often just skip the tripod and just pick up the phone when I'm about to draw.

That's pretty cool!

Thanks!

Show HN: Grapic – Real whiteboards online using AR