3 ms·

Re: how they operate, we have one in the conference room near my desk. It's fine for projecting small meetings, the touch functionality is occasionally useful

Re: how they operate, we have one in the conference room near my desk. It's fine for projecting small meetings, the touch functionality is occasionally useful (but I don't think I'm the target audience). The biggest issue for me is that while a projector can generate a much larger image and a whiteboard can provide a much larger single working space, scaling sufficiently to match either of those would be tricky.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
That is a good data point. How small is a 'small' meeting? 5 people? 10 people? 20 people? When I was at Google they experimented with some smart whiteboards, it was not a successful experiment but most of that was trying to 'sync' between multiple rooms was a pain and at the time a "40" screen considered pretty big. My interest started when I looked at replacing the whiteboard I have in my home office with something that was dual use like this. The newest generation 'NUC' computers can drive a 4K screen at 30hz so one of the cheaper 4K TVs might be a replacement.
- existencebox 11y ago
  With a table facing the screen lengthwise and seating on both sides of it, by ~6 people you're 3 deep away from the screen, and things start to get a bit small. You can zoom in, resize diagrams, but at least for content originally designed for a standard desktop web browser, there ended up being a decent amount of cropping with what I experienced; this is a tradeoff against increased meeting size, although it is certainly possible. (I guess as a caveat, it would depend heavily on the content type. We were looking heavily at UML style diagrams, with reasonable amounts of text, the latter necessitating zooming while the former forced zooming to crop some of the diagram.) I've always wondered why we never took a page out of the book of the old projection monitors, with some sort of semi-opaque screen with a rear projector, and vision sensors on the front for touch. It'd make wall mounting it hard, but if you got very clever with the projector location and how you focus the image, you may be able to shrink the depth. (I've desired a similar smart whiteboard, but the added value over a standard ~3-400$ whole wall board is hard bought at this price point, especially without the size benefit)

ChuckMcM 11y ago

That is a good data point. How small is a 'small' meeting? 5 people? 10 people? 20 people? When I was at Google they experimented with some smart whiteboards, it was not a successful experiment but most of that was trying to 'sync' between multiple rooms was a pain and at the time a "40" screen considered pretty big. My interest started when I looked at replacing the whiteboard I have in my home office with something that was dual use like this. The newest generation 'NUC' computers can drive a 4K screen at 30hz so one of the cheaper 4K TVs might be a replacement.

existencebox 11y ago
With a table facing the screen lengthwise and seating on both sides of it, by ~6 people you're 3 deep away from the screen, and things start to get a bit small. You can zoom in, resize diagrams, but at least for content originally designed for a standard desktop web browser, there ended up being a decent amount of cropping with what I experienced; this is a tradeoff against increased meeting size, although it is certainly possible. (I guess as a caveat, it would depend heavily on the content type. We were looking heavily at UML style diagrams, with reasonable amounts of text, the latter necessitating zooming while the former forced zooming to crop some of the diagram.) I've always wondered why we never took a page out of the book of the old projection monitors, with some sort of semi-opaque screen with a rear projector, and vision sensors on the front for touch. It'd make wall mounting it hard, but if you got very clever with the projector location and how you focus the image, you may be able to shrink the depth. (I've desired a similar smart whiteboard, but the added value over a standard ~3-400$ whole wall board is hard bought at this price point, especially without the size benefit)