Linking Up Smart Boards?

So I have an acquaintance who is a trainer and is looking for a way to use SL to bridge the gap in long-distance education.

His questions are:

Is there a way to interface his Smart Board with SL so that whatever he draws also gets drawn on a "smart board" object located in SL so that all the avatars in the SL class can see it?

On the heels of that, is it possible to have the student's Smart Board similarly interfaced but in such a way that not only does the SL based board change but so does the student's real-life Smart Board?

Thanks for the insights.

---Bahaar Babcock

Maybe. Depends how "Smart Boards" work, but it's easy enough to test, I think. On a parcel of land where you have control of the parcel media settings, go to About Land / Media, and make settings corresponding to the URL of the thing you want to see, then adjust it on the web and see how long it takes to appear on a media-textured prim--if at all. If "Smart Boards" are Flash or browser-side scripted, this won't work at all, but if they're just clean html, it should work.

There's no current way to interact with such things from in-world. (Well... only *very* indirectly, and clumsily.)

[ETA: I do this with Google Calendar all the time, but I've never paid much attention to how quickly it updates. It can't be instantaneous, but every time I've looked at the in-world calendar, it's had my most-recent updates, FWIW.]

There's a thing called a SMARTBoard at http://ced.ncsu.edu/edit/smartboard/smart1.php .

There's a section there than ays "Movies - By select Recorder from the SMART Board menu, you can record you work as playable AVI or QuickTime movies which can be watched in real time. You can change the recording quality and frame rate to suit your preferences and space restrictions. For more information on saving your work as movies, see the documentation accompanying the downloadable SMART Board software."

Sounds like you might be able to get a realtime output that can be seen in SL with SL's Quicktime player.

Nifty!

Thanks for the input, everyone. It's got me on the track for answers.

---Bahaar

Not that I know of, the annotations on a smart board won't appear in SL.

Why would the annotations not appear if they are viewed with the QT viewer?

It's supposed to emit a stream, a quick time video stream from what it says.

If this is workable I suspect it might involve using a stream service. Smartboard sends to stream provider, stream provider sends to SL users.

All I know about it is in the link I gave.

There's RL educator groups in SL that might have tried such things.

There's a workshop on SmartBoard streaming in SL, url for the ad is http://community.discoveryeducation.com/event/2008/06/20/wed_workshop_den_sl_streaming_smartboards_opening_window_digital_world

meeting inworld 07/30/2008 - 9:00pm http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%20II/75/100/22

Here's a video on SmartBoards and Second Life, or at least showing the. used together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra50XTelwro . I bet the guy in the video or the person that made the video know something about smartboards and SL.

You might want to hook up with the person who made this blog: http://www.teach42.com/2008/06/12/cell_phone_web_cam_second_life_magic/

If they aren't familiar with the SmartBoard itself I bet they know how to find someone that is.

The you tube video shows the problem better than I can explain, you can't really see the circles he's drawing.

However, the OP has confused me by talking about students having RL smartboards, people don't generally have a smartboard at home so maybe he's using a genertic term rather than the brand.