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Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

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Re: Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

#31

Post by josephg »

jcomis wrote: post #19
basseq wrote: post #5

A 40-50" (diagonal) "whiteboard" is still very small. I have a 4'x10' whiteboard right behind me, and a 6'x4' to my immediate right, and I'm always running out of room.

I'd imagine you can be more precise digitally. And hopefully can swipe around a larger canvas to make more room or something.

I picked up a wacom tablet + mischief[1] a couple years ago as a digital whiteboarding solution for classroom teaching. It supports arbitrary zooming and infinite panning - so you never have to delete anything, but can just keep moving around and 'finding' more fresh space to write in. I have a really hard time going back to normal whiteboards now given how limited they are. (And photos of the whiteboard after a meeting are really nowhere near as good as an editable source file you can pass around).

Since moving back to engineering work I've started using it for talks, brainstorming and architecture reviews. Eg, this is what a solo few days of project planning & brainstorming looked like recently - https://josephg.com/mischief.png . But in meetings it lacks multiplayer - only one person can hold the tablet at a time, and the interface is nowhere near as intuitive as a real whiteboard. The software is also kind of awful - it idles on 5% CPU usage for no apparent reason, and I've lost work on numerous occasions from it crashing without autosaving (!!). The mac version feels like a bad port of a windows program.

The tool itself frustrates me enough that I'll probably end up writing a collaborative online version on top of sharejs, even if I'm the only person who uses it. (It'd be much easier to do now that pointer events[2] are being supported in more browsers. Safari developers - hate the API all you like, but we really need an interface for tablets somehow!)

[1] https://www.madewithmischief.com/ [2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer

Re: Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

#32

Post by mikeleeorg »

Navarr wrote: post #25
radiorental wrote: post #12

We've been researching solutions in this space for quite a while. We have 6x 80" smartboards and have tried everything from Lync to Realtimeboard. While some solutions work better than others, no one has solved a fundamental problem... When you try to collaborate in real time with a remote person - all the human communication cues are lost. Collaboration is a dynamic and fluid process. We subconsciously read each oth…

Is there any solution to this other than in-depth VR?

Teleportation? Synthetic local proxy android?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic. This is definitely a problem faced by any company with remote teams, including mine. I'm not saying any of the solutions I posited are feasible, but one day, far in the future, I'm hopeful that some kind of solution will be developed. If anything, because there is a huge market in facilitating communication between remote teams.

Re: Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

#35

Post by grblovrflowerrr »

radiorental wrote: post #12

We've been researching solutions in this space for quite a while. We have 6x 80" smartboards and have tried everything from Lync to Realtimeboard. While some solutions work better than others, no one has solved a fundamental problem... When you try to collaborate in real time with a remote person - all the human communication cues are lost. Collaboration is a dynamic and fluid process. We subconsciously read each oth…

I make a VR app for this use case: http://hyper-room.io

Website doesn't show it now but there's whiteboards as well:

http://i.imgur.com/TzXrRPc.jpg

Currently the only nonverbal cues I can really get across are hand/head movements(with cube avatars) but as far as achieving presence goes I find that to go a long way. Even without facial expressions or complicated hand gestures having that "physical" presence seems to make each session feel really concrete, and less like you're talking to someone through the ether. To make up for the loss of facial expressions I've found myself and others becoming more gestural when using the app, which may not be ideal, but the fact that you can adapt at all(and that it feels natural) sets it apart from 2D interfaces.

Re: Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

#37

Post by smoyer »

We built collaborative whiteboards into our distance learning classrooms in 1997 or 1998. Smartboards were around for several years before we started and we wrote custom drivers to capture the cursor position and send the pointer information to the remote sites.

Re: Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

#39

Post by Spivak »

ohstopitu wrote: post #24
vonklaus wrote: post #9

I can't be sure, but it seems like they are just going to release a big Wacom tablet and add real-time collaboration for the price of a 2013 SMART car. That isn't a fair comparison, as it is unlikely corporations will be comparing a fleet of used smart cars to collaboration workstations in their budget. WTF is the usecase for this? 10-11k for people to draw on the same canvas in different locations? I think it is act…

so you are saying there's a market for a 4k 55" collaborative device that recognizes pen, multi-touch, has a camera and hopefully software that does not suck and integrates with Hangouts / Skype for Business at a lower pricepoint? Seriously though...I have yet to see the Surface Hub used anywhere apart from MS offices.

I think his point is that there is a market for business collaboration tools since remote teams are becoming more common, but for all its technical merit, a large featureful interactive whiteboard doesn't really solve the problem -- and it's a very expensive way to not solve a problem.

Re: Jamboard – The whiteboard reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

#40

Post by kimburgess »

Navarr wrote: post #25
radiorental wrote: post #12

We've been researching solutions in this space for quite a while. We have 6x 80" smartboards and have tried everything from Lync to Realtimeboard. While some solutions work better than others, no one has solved a fundamental problem... When you try to collaborate in real time with a remote person - all the human communication cues are lost. Collaboration is a dynamic and fluid process. We subconsciously read each oth…

Is there any solution to this other than in-depth VR?

There's a few emerging attempts. From all that I've experienced though, nobody has completely 'solved' remote collaboration.

For some tech nerdery: Oblong Mezzanine (http://www.oblong.com/), Prysm Visual Workplace (http://www.prysm.com/prysm-visual-workplace), MultiTaction MT-Canvus (https://www.multitaction.com/products/mt-canvus side note: check out their touch tech, it's f'ing cool), DisplayNote Montage (https://www.displaynote.com/wireless-presentation-system/), as well as MS Surface hub, all the SMART products, and the multitude of other 'meeting room IWB / touch solutions' out there.

All of these centre around the concept of a large display surface, some digital whiteboarding, flexible content layout then some VC 'tacked on' so that remote paricipants can join in.

What I find waaaay more interesting is some more of the combination acoustic + CV based camera tracking that's starting to make it's way to market. In addition to tracking people, it can also track objects of interest — things like auto-framing a whiteboard when someone approaches it. Cisco is currently doing this on their collaboration endpoints with SpeakerTrack and PresterTrack and other vendors have similar tech too. There's also a solutions that are starting to use camera arrays or super wide angle sensors to capture a larger scene and extract areas of interest (https://www.huddly.com/, http://www.owllabs.com/).

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