Show HN: Grapic – Real whiteboards online using AR

So nice to see you sharing this. I think it's a very useful tool. I love your landing page, and the app is incredibly fast and intuitive.

When I was still working at Spotify, there were many cases where we needed to show a whiteboard in a meeting. It was always awkward, borderline impossible to show stuff in a mixed in-person/remote meeting. This is where I think your product will fit in. If it's remote-only, people can use an iPad; for in-person, the whiteboard will do the job. But these mixed scenarios - even just a meeting between two teams, one in London, one in NY for example - they were just unbelievably awkward.

The company looked into solutions like digital whiteboards, and while I'm sure they are great in theory, it also means you always need to get a room that has one of these. Anyone who's worked at a big corp knows how hard it can be to find a meeting room. We had some prototypes standing around (in open areas, actually - for whatever reason), but they were rarely used. These things are brutally expensive, too - your product is just an infinitely better idea IMO.

For my personal use (fully remote team), I found it tricky to hold the camera while also drawing. Using a tripod surely works, but then I can also just use the iPad and draw stuff there.

I would highly encourage you to promote this as a tool for larger corporations with multiple offices. The Zoom integration is fantastic in this regard - I don't know how hard it would be to also integrate with Google Meet (that was the software we used), but I think that that's the way to go.

Again, fantastic work. Very impressive implementation, and I think it's a great idea!

Disclosure to HN: Niko and I know each other personally, and I already used Grapic when it was in beta.

For us I guess the need arose in a pure remote environment. But none of us had ipads to draw on at that time. Totally agree on the mixed / hybrid work setup though. I think I've had a million awkward meetings around a whiteboard with one or two remote team members trying to see what was going on with a laptop camera pointed to the whiteboard.

We realized quite quickly that we need good integrations for this tool to be really useful and we'd really love to have integrations with Teams and Meet as well. Those services are much tougher to get video into though but hopefully we can have something there relatively soon. Another cool use-case we think is together with digital whiteboards like Miro or FigJam. We have a pretty cool FigJam integration coming up which we're hoping will be a really nice experience.

During the pandemic, two friends and I built Grapic [1], an AR app to let us use real paper and whiteboards to brainstorm when working remote. We're all visual thinkers and found the drawing part really lacking in tools like Miro.

The aim is to make it possible to screen share any real surface. We use AR and some computer vision to let you mark a rectangle on a flat surface (like a whiteboard or paper notebook), and then stream a stabilized and "flattened" version of that surface as video. The video can either be shared as to a webRTC room that you can access with a link or directly into a zoom meeting over Airplay [2].

The app is currently iOS only and we're holding off an Android version until we know there is sufficient demand.

We would be super thankful for any feedback or advice!

Best

Niko

[1] Grapic website: https://www.grapic.co/

[2] Note: There is unfortunately a bug in Zoom on macOS Monterey where Airplay to Mac interferes with Zooms Airplay screen sharing. Zoom is working on a fix but in the meantime there is a workaround: https://www.grapic.co/zoom-troubleshooting