Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Microsoft reveals intelligent whiteboard


Microsoft Research recently revealed at its annual Techfest exhibition, an interactive and intelligent whiteboard called SketchInsight. This revolutionary product could be the future of business and educational presentations.


In the 3-minute video TechFest released, Dr. Bongshin Lee of Microsoft research demonstrated how SketchInsight intelligently responds to drawn commands. In the example shown by Dr. Lee, drawing a simple circle creates a pie chart, L shape creates a graph with x and y axes, and drawing an open ended bar creates a bar chart. Also, writing on the graph axes "ye" yielded "years" and "pop" gives population, complete with all related data provided.

"Creating personalized, expressive data charts becomes quick and easy. The presenter simply sketches an example, and SketchInsight automatically completes the chart by synthesizing from example sketches.", Microsoft explained.

These presentations may be similarly produced using PowerPoint, but SketchInsight offers real time creation of presentations enabling presenters to change them as needed with a single touch. In the video shown, a chart can be further narrowed down to selected datasets by simply touching and eliminating areas on the map.

Although still in the prototype stages, we still hope more details will be revealed by Microsoft regarding how the system works and complex datasets are interpreted, prepared and loaded. A similar system or idea could also do well if it can also be adapted to explore and analyse presentation data on tablet PCs.

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