Intuitive Cursor Control using Optical Processing Software

Cheaper, more accesible touchscreens...

Benefits

The foremost application for our product would be as a portable smart board directed at application in schools and universities. That way it would constitute a significant technological advancement from blackboards because it can incorporate multimedia tools such as the internet, videos, graphics, and software into the in class presentation on the same surface as notes are taken. Furthermore, notes can be saved on a computer and readjusted at another lesson and distributed easily to the entire class, so that more learning materials are available and a well-rounded education is not limited by the teaching equipment. These are usually the advantages of regular smartboards but our application would make a replacement of blackboards that are still present in most classrooms superfluous. Our product can be mounted on any surface, with a variable size and the installation process is easy to do and does not require specialists. We simply need to mount the cameras on either side of the screen area, set up a projector and run the software. Therefore, our product is one of the most up to date tools in the presentation market and is able to compete with any competitor. While this technology is new, there are already similar products by companies such as digitalblue (now!board) or vaborn (vaborn portable series). These products however are expensive (£300 -£500). While this is still more cost efficient than regular smartboards that can cost up to £1300, the purpose of our product is to enable every teacher to design their lesson as freely as possible. Our product would solve this problem. Depending on the desired accuracy of the screen we can reduce hardware costs down to £12 (cost of our prototype) and fashion a final product that could be sold at about £20. This would give our product a significant competitive edge because the prices of competitors cannot compare to ours. Furthermore, we see that there is an infinite amount of possibilities to expand on this business model. One way to expand the product range would be to offer certain software upgrades that are custom tailored to our product in order to make life easier for teachers, for instance by providing software that makes the distribution of notes and contents easy. Also, we showed that we can incorporate laser pointers as a controlling tool which would offer applications in presentations at the workplace and maybe offer a cheap alternative to certain products in gaming.