Microsoft reveals SketchInsight interactive whiteboard prototype (video)

5 Mar 2013

Bongshin Lee of Microsoft Research demonstrates SketchInsight. Image via Microsoft

Microsoft is working on a new type of interactive whiteboard called SketchInsight that will aim to let users tell a story using interactive sketches and make sense of big data.

The company has put the whiteboard prototype on display at its annual TechFest event this week.

A report on BBC News Online described the interactive whiteboard prototype as aiming to interpret users’ sketches so as to complete the diagrams they were drawing and create interactive charts, diagrams or maps.

According to Microsoft Research, SketchInsight will be a data-enabled bespoke canvas that will allow people to create interactive data charts through simple sketches.

The plan, said the company, will be to extend the narrative of whiteboard animation with interactive information visualisation techniques to create a new form of storytelling with data.

The whiteboard is still at the concept stage, however, but it seems to be part of Microsoft’s plan to present big data in a more meaningful way.

SketchInsight

In the following video Bongshin Lee, a researcher at Microsoft Research, demonstrates how the interactive whiteboard system for storytelling with data through real-time sketching would work.

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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