A new view on presentations

At the recent Future Forward conference in Portsmouth, NH, ViewWriter Technologies’ sponsor table caught my eye. A podium-like device was sitting on it with a sort of white board embdded in its surface that captured everything the presenter wrote on it, including material on a traditional printed transparency. The output was being displayed on a nearby television screen. What’s really cool about this product – the ViewWriter – is that it acts as its own media switch, accepting input from video cameras, VCR/DVDs, document cameras and even PCs. The presenter controls the display via a couple buttons on the podiums surface. Anything fed through the device can be pushed to a local monitor or over a videoconference. I thought it was a pretty neat spin on the white board approach, offering it in a form factor most presenters are used to.