The MagicBoard Project

François IIHM CLIPS IMAG
"The Magic Table: Computer-Vision Based Augmentation of a Whiteboard for Creative Meetings" paper (.pdf, 879 Kb) presented at the IEEE Workshop on Projector Camera Systems (2003). You can also check for the MagicBoard in the medias page...
         
The MagicBoard project aims at augmenting a perfectly ordinary whiteboard-like surface with electronic capabilities, via a video projector and a pan / tilt / zoom camera.

The user works on the board as in the usual way, drawing or writing with ordinary marker pens. Whenever she chooses, the user can "grab" an electronic copy of the things that have been drawn or written with the marker pen. This copy is projected back onto the board, precisely overlaying the original markings with the appropriate colour. The physical ink may then be erased and the electronic version manipulated on the board's surface: it can be duplicated, moved, enlarged or reduced, printed, or hidden for a moment before being recalled. Meanwhile, the user may add to her designs with the marker pen as before. At any time, these new markings can be turned into digital form to merge with the electronic version of her work.

MagicBoard illustration
       
The movie on the left (mpeg, 23.9 Mb) shows the last version of our system. This system was implemented while the main author was working at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Vision and Modeling group as part of the Facilitator Room project. It executes on a PC (Pentium III @ 833 Mhz). We switched from vertical to horizontal surface because we found that a table allows for more people interacting at the same time.

The movie is available in several formats:

         
The images below illustrate the quality of the capture process: if the capture is to be printed or processed by optical character recognition, the resolution can be increased by grabbing more images of the board. The image on the right is the result of a 6 by 6 mosaïquing of the image on the left (click on the images to get full resolution). The right image is also available at medium resolution (70Kb, 900 x 675 pixels), and at full resolution (340Kb, 3600 x 2700 pixels).
         
low resolution raw imagevery low resolution processed image
 
Our most recent results (on finger tracking) can be seen on the movies page. The previous version of the system is described on an other web page.
         
The systems runs on top of TclVision, a multi-platform interactive computer vision environment (MacOS / SGI IRIX / Linux / win2k). Our main workstation is a PC (Pentium III @ 800 Mhz).
         
The MagicBoard is an active project at the Human-Computer Interaction group at CLIPS-IMAG laboratory in Grenoble, France. Developers François Bérard
Sébastien Annedouche
Benoît Loup
Michel Prodhomme
Yann Laurillau
Christian Hardenberg
Julien T. Letessier
Contributors Joëlle Coutaz
David Thevenin
Leon Watts
William Astier
Related work Pierre Wellner's DigitalDesk
Eric Saund's ZombieBoard
François IIHM CLIPS IMAG
François IIHM CLIPS IMAG
 
Created on June 19, 1999 by François Bérard, artwork from Gregory Barborini.
Last update June 9, 2003.