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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Thinking back to college, a fully-drawn whiteboard is only somewhat useful. What's most important is the presentation - what the person is saying while they draw, the order the drawings are made, and how they connect.

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?

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> The real value is in the presentation.

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.

And though it's not the presentation, its an aide de memoir of it (for those present).

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 time-lapse would be great as well.

seems like the onenote revision history (undo, redo, and version tracking) could be hacked to accomplish something similar.

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 a GIF (or PNG) of the time lapse, as well as a still image of the final frame?

I was thinking of something with a slider so you can find that diagram someone drew in the middle of a discussion last week.

You should see what Imgur has done in merging GIFs and WEBM videos. Every GIF has full video controls, including a slider and a play/pause button.

So basically if we just hosted the timelapse on Imgur...

We've made a board that can achieve the playback. Made a quick demo video of our first prototype. Would love any more ideas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmVtfF6pIo

Since the data on a whiteboard could be vector based, something like a diffed SVG could work better.

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.

Yeah, I don't disagree.

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.

Taking Minutes is something that's still hard to delegate to automation. I usually just do this myself when nobody else is taking minutes. Having a meeting without minutes is as bad as erasing the whiteboard immediately after drawing on it.

  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)

I think I just made a product, who wants to help me develop/distribute it? Looks like $60 in hardware costs, who would pay $100 for one of these?

Bah, you're selling it in corporate spaces, charge 10x that much!

I like the basic idea, but a couple problems i see, Glare on the whiteboard from something like a window, and the board being obstructed by someone writing on it.

Bane, We've been working on solving the exact problem you pointed out. We've made a whiteboard which lets you broadcast everything you write with a normal marker to a mobile device. It's not perfect yet but we'll get there soon. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmVtfF6pIo

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