Magic Marker
Meeting hell: Someone - most likely your boss - is scribbling ideas, dates and
numbers onto a whiteboard faster than you could ever copy them onto your
notepad. Eventually you give up, hoping that somebody else has kept a
better record than you have. If the room has an electronic whiteboard, of
course, you're in luck - but such devices, which cost thousands of dollars,
are far from being standard conference - room equipment.
Now comes a gadget - the mimio, from MIT spinoff Virtual Ink of Cambridge,
Mass. - that captures the markings made on any ordinary whiteboard in real
time and stores them on a PC for future perusal. The device consists of a
portable sensor bar that attaches with suction cups to any flat writing
surface - even a windowpane will do. A cable connects the bar to a PC.
Ordinary markers are held in special ultrasound - emitting jackets; as the
marker moves, the sensor tracks its motion by computing the ultrasound's
travel time. The jackets even emit an infrared signal that indicates the
marker's color.
