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Microsoft Research is making a whiteboard that finishes sketches

Last week, Microsoft reopened its Envisioning Center in its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, which presented the company's view of how technology would enter the workplace and the home in the near future. This week, Microsoft offered up a specific future technology idea that could be used in business settings.

The BBC reports that the project, from the Microsoft Research division, is called SketchInsight. It's a touchscreen interactive whiteboard concept that has been made so that users who sketch on the screen can have their creations finished by the whiteboard's technology.

Currently, multimedia presentations, such as the ones made by users of Microsoft's own PowerPoint software, must all be created in advance. SketchInsight would help save time in the creation process by allowing the whiteboard's processing power to interpret what the user is presenting via pre-loaded data. One example was offered by Microsoft Research's Bongshin Lee.

By drawing stick figures Dr Lee can bring up a graph showing the spread of the population covered by the study, and then by sketching a battery alongside it she can bring up another chart illustrating how specific groups of people use different amounts of power.

Obviously, this research project is a long way from showing up in a big company's board room but it does show that Microsoft is looking at how people interact with so-called "big data" in new ways.

Source: BBC | Image via Microsoft

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