As always, software will be the problem, so if the software is well thought out this could be awesome.
edit thanks for the downvote?
what did you disagree with?
The real value is in the presentation.
When you get a picture of the whiteboard, it doesn't just give you that static info. It helps you remember the presentation the way that a photo of home brings back the smells of home.
But a dozen minutes of meeting that record someone's whiteboard presentation, is a lot to store for later review. How do we automate the pulling of important, informative parts out of a video?
This is true sometimes, but if it's a design discussion and you're whiteboarding how something should be laid out, or even steps of what's completed and what's left, just a snapshot of the final state of the whiteboard is tremendously useful. It prevents the need for another person jotting down everything that was written up on the board.
Better than one's own jotting, in that the specific lettering and diagram shapes are linked to the presentation (though the cognitive processing involved in one's own jotting is also valuable).
a video/audio scrubber control that lets you go back and forth.
also another interesting thing about OneNote is that it can record audio, and embed a time index of the audio into everything that is being written,drawn or typed into a notebook. Currently it highlights what was done at that time index of the audio. but it could be used to show the exact state of page at any given time in the recording.
The Audio recording feature has been in onenote since 2003 SP1.
So basically if we just hosted the timelapse on Imgur...
MS already has something like this in OneNote, but I'm not sure how frequent the snapshots are. It's more of a revision history than a "watch every letter be written", IIRC.
But I think that this forms just one model for how whiteboards can work.
There's still lots of value in being able to capture the current state of the board and send it out, which is something which frustratingly doesn't yet work as simply as it should.
I've even resorted to having a 'minutes taker' designated in a meeting, who's job it was to capture and annotate useful diagrams and work on the whiteboard and send them out to all the parties there.
I like another comment's suggestion of a time-lapse.
* So we'd just need a webcam (or other camera implementation) ($5?)
* Stick this to the wall opposite the whiteboard? ($5 in tape?)
* Have a RasPi do the heavy lifting and email? ($35?)
Or maybe a cloud-backend for the video-to-GIF? (Imgur integration?) ($40?)
* Wifi setup seems like a solved problem by now. ($10)
Turns out they had fundamentally misunderstood the mode of communication that whiteboards enable and how it's different than slides.
<rant> On that note, here's a rant about iPad used for scratch paper:
I sometimes try to use an iPad for scratch paper but it doesn't really work out the way I want. Requirements: - Scratch paper doesn't need to persist very long, just while I'm still in the middle of working it out. - The final result needs to last until I'm done taking the actions it describes. - It needs to be easy to find the scratch papers for projects I'm currently working on. They need to still be editable in that case too.
What I get instead is: - "Notes" organization with multiple pages in a notebook and folders, but the interface to organize and navigate between these isn't very good. I often don't bother to organize because of that. It also makes it hard to remember which notebook has the thing I want. - Pencil and paper is still better than finger or passive stylus due to palm detection, line width, accuracy, and the need to zoom and scroll due to those problems. An active stylus can help but I don't currently own one. - Too many choices of software, so I stick with the one I have now instead of buying them all to try them all. None of them sound like what I want from their descriptions. - On active styluses, same problem. Too expensive to buy them all and try them. Reviews focus on the wrong things. It is either talking about writing words for a note, in which case the reviews usually say it doesn't matter what features the stylus has, or it is about art. I want to draw simple sketches of flowcharts, UI, etc. which is kinda like drawing art but not so picky about certain features. - Partly due to organization issues, I tend to not delete old scratch notes from the iPad. Even something email-like with an "Archive" button or moving to a "Read Mail" folder would help. - Most of the software that I've tried does not easily sync with a PC/Mac. It might have an export to PDF / PNG option but that is a one-way export. - I do not want a subscription cloud service for my scratch paper notes. I don't want a subscription cloud service at all, thank you very much.
</rant>
Yeah, it organizes things into notes and notebooks, but I usually ignore that and just email myself the notes I've just taken as a PDF for later review...and that seems to work pretty well for most cases...and I get to integrate those notes into the rest of my on-computer organization scheme.
SMART makes a ton of money in the education market, and we had about a dozen at my high school. The touch controls aren't sensitive or precise enough, the model of projecting onto a separate touchscreen means that it has to be recalibrated constantly, and the only software (SMART's drawing software) that takes advantage of the functionality has almost no features and still manages to have a horrible UI. No teacher used it for more than two or three lessons.
Of course this is pretty impressive 6 years ago. If they haven't changed at all since then, I wouldn't use them, I would just project a touchscreen computer and use a stylus.
Funny enough, an old predecessor to all this treated the board surface kind of like a large scanner face, when you were ready to "capture" the board, you hit a button and a large arm scanned the board and printed out a black and white copy of the board contents onto a piece of thermal paper. In a few seconds you could print off a copy for everybody in the room. From the age of paper sadly, but definitely simple and useful.