Saturday, April 4, 2009

I want to do iwhiteboarding with OMDoc

The following technology tip is a "nice to know" thing, so bother yourself reading this post only if you are up to inspiration search.

Most of you should know TED talks, which is quite a remarkable "talks" archive among relevant mass media. BTW it also has a channel on youtube.
For instance, you can meet there talks by nobel prize holders, or in KWARC case a talk by Tim Berners-Lee would be not really inspiring, but curious
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6XIICm_qo&feature=channel

Now if you are carefully following the mainstream of IT gadget development, you will not be surprised by multi touching interfaces and projected surfaces of extended reality, with all the corresponding software. Well there are a lot of talks like this mainly by TED, but also by google tech and others.

Here is a story of one technical and cheap (industry oriented) approach to so called interactive whiteboards. The hero of a story is Johnny Lee, and his hack will certainly kick into agility of white board demand (by e-learning).
> ".. Lee is best known for his work on extending the functionality of the Wii Remote controller of the Wii video game console, most notably by taking advantage of its high resolution IR camera. Lee's other projects include an interactive whiteboard, 3D head tracking, and finger tracking." (c) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist)

Johnny Lee's wii remote hack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgKCrGvShZs&NR=1

Please see the relevant videos to catch how easy it is to implement youtube spread idea of wii hack in practice, especially
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UDMimkCD_4&feature=response_watch

My first impression of iwhiteboard was "I want to do OMDoc on it". Now I know that theoretically I can do one myself for a few hundred Euro, because of the discussed trick.

I wounder how soon it will take us to do OMDoc interactive white board queering and browsing ;-) KWARC should seriously consider the idea of writing some trivial iwhiteboarding OMDOC support software. Well that could be some presentation layer of SWiM with full featured SWiM iboard support in mind.

Anyway, if there were canonical mathematicians unsure of computational proving methods (mainly because you need to get too deep into computer science to do the check), there is a high probability that they could be cheaply bought and converted by the use of new "old" means. I am sure that now we are witnessing an industrial manifestation or even a presence (not only science fiction domain idea), that one can do an old style "piece of chalk" black board math and not see a difference. Well, of course there is a difference. Now I can interact with mathematical objects on a board not solely in my private conceptual domain, but having "all of Bourbaki" [(c) Michael Kohlhase] under my stylus.

PS

If you are still bored, watch this for ideas of iwhiteboard extension into daily life (6th sense as meta information management, well, basically, knowledge management):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ-VjUKAsao

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