Beyond the Drawing Board: Toward More Effective Use of Whiteboard Content

Abstract: We developed a system that augments traditional office whiteboards with computation for the purposes of retrieving, reusing, and sharing whiteboard content. Our system automatically captures changes to whiteboard images, detects significant changes, and identifies potential collaborative activities. Users then browse and search the collection of images captured from their camera or shared from other users' cameras based on aspects such as location, time, collaboration, etc. We report on the results of a formative study and on an evaluation of effectiveness of our system, and discuss additional functionality that can be built on our framework.