Title: LiveBoard : A Large Interactive Display Supporting Group
Meetings, Presentations and Remote Collaborations
Authors: Scott Elrod, Richard Bruce, David Goldberg, Frank Halasz,
William Janssen, David Lee, Kim McCall, Elin Pedersen, Ken Pier, John Tang
and Brent Welch
Citation: Proceedings of the ACM
Reprinted in: Baecker, R.M., Readings in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 1993, pp. 709-717
This paper is essentially about the design considerations involved with the
design of the large, interactive display system, The LiveBoard. The system's
conspicuous features include a one million pixel display and an accurate,
cordless pen. The main idea of going for thisdesign is the lack of direct,
dynamic interactivity of a white board or flipchart in traditional electronic
meeting room systems.
Two prominent features of The LiveBoard that enable comfortable viewing are -
projection from a digitally addressed liquid crystal display and incorporation
of a rear projection screen which widely disperses the image so that they can be
seen at oblique angles. The pen has four states - one for drawing, the second
for pop-up menus and the rest for other means of input control. The hardware
description includes the projection details of the LiveBoard and the LCD. The
software for the system included the device driver for the pen, a walk-up
interface called the BoardWalk that is a simple extension of the TWM Window
Manager.
Some of the applications that used the LiveBoard were discussed. The WhiteBoard
was an application designed to support the use of people writing down ideas and
retrieving information. It is a simple X-11 based bit-map painting program. The
SlideShow presentation tool combines the features of a slide projector and an
overhead transparency projector. It uses a display graphics package with device
independent imaging.
Over the years, LiveBoards have been used for a variety of purposes : hardware
researchers for meeting facilitation, managers for presentations, designers for
remote collboration etc. The suggestions for improvement include increasing the
resolution of the screen, the accuracy of the pen and reducing the errors
arising due to parallax. Development of the LiveBoard indicated its vast diffe-
rence from using the mouse. Also need was felt for an easy-to-use software
unlike Unix. However, the networking properties of Unix are lost by this
approach. Much of the future work involves arriving at a compromise between
these approaches.