For a good many years, the conference room whiteboard has been the focal point for sharing ideas, plans and strategies in team meetings. In today's connected business world, team members could be spread out all over the globe, though, making meetings in the flesh a little impractical. Digitized whiteboards like the Smart Kapp can capture all the scribbling action and send it to the smartphones of remote team members in real-time, but if your collaborative jotting pad takes up a whole boardroom wall then finding a smart whiteboard to take its place could prove expensive. The Kaptivo system can be installed above any dry-erase whiteboard up to 6 x 4 ft (1.8 x 1.2 m) in size, doesn't require note-makers to use special pens and captures and cleans up what's on the board before zipping it over to connected team members in real-time.
Looking rather like an overhead lamp, the main Kaptivo unit is mounted above the whiteboard and includes an integrated camera, processing brain, onboard storage and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE. A power adapter plugs into a control pad to the side of the board, from which a cable runs up to the main unit.
"Kaptivo's optical design is centered around an ultra-short throw imaging system, based on a 5-megapixel Omnivision CMOS sensor and a proprietary wide-angle lens with a 140-degree field of view, enabling high-resolution, distortion-free capture of boards up to 6 x 4 ft in size," Adrian Cable of Light Blue Optics told Gizmag. "The low noise of the CMOS sensor, together with the large lens aperture, result in outstanding full-color performance even in very low light conditions.
"Kaptivo contains an integrated CPU/DSP which processes the image stream from the camera in real time using our proprietary, patent-pending image analysis engine. The engine analyzes the view of the board, compensating for any residual distortion, shadows, reflections, and ambient light level changes across the board area or over time. A second layer of processing then analyzes each point in the image to confirm it as dry-erase ink, or reject it as background, occlusion, or moving foreground content (for example, hands or other body parts in front of the board while writing)."
The cleaned-up digital image is then encoded, compressed and encrypted before being relayed to the company's cloud secure cloud service. Members of the team can view the live stream by logging into a password-protected portal via any web browser or through dedicated mobile apps for iOS or Android smart devices.
Key frames are recorded to the system memory, allowing users to rewind the session to review the development of collaborative ideas. Captured content can also be converted to a PDF document and shared among team members.
Light Blue Optics has finished testing Kaptivo prototypes and is readying the system for the final push to production. To this end, the company is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. As of writing, pledges start at US$159 (representing a substantial saving on the expected retail launch price of $349) and, if all goes to plan, shipping is expected to start in August.
The pitch video can be seen below.
Sources: Light Blue Optics, Kickstarter
